On Fire

by Larry Brown

  I swing the pumper away from the curb and step down hard on the pedal and she downshifts and then shifts up and we gain speed. I take off my helmet and the wind feels good in my hair.

  Later, when we get back to the station, we find out that somebody has left a piece of equipment at the house, but naturally nobody wants to go back and get it. I’m the captain, I have to go back and get it. I get into the van I drive sometimes and tell them I’ll be back in a few minutes. If they have a call while I’m gone, somebody can drive the pumper and I can meet them there in the van.

  The drunks are still in the yard and in the house, still arguing. I don’t say anything to them, I just get out and go into the house and pick up the rechargeable light that was left behind and head back out with it. Even the police don’t like to come down here on Saturday night, and they have guns.

  A house burns on North Seventh Street one night when I’m off duty, taking a vacation day. Uncle Bunky and Poot Man go through the front door and a corpse is on the floor, his eyes red and his dead hand reaching for the doorknob and the life-giving air six feet away.

  A man who lives in a nice house in a nice neighborhood in Oxford has the not-nice habit of getting drunk and then falling asleep in bed smoking a cigarette. In several instances several months apart, he catches the house on fire. Another shift goes over and puts the house out both times, and his insurance company rebuilds it both times.

  And one night, a few months later, when Poot Man is on duty, they get a call to the same house. This time he’s on fire in his bed. He dies, despite their efforts. One month later, Poot Man resigns, and nobody blames him. There are days when all of us are taken to our limits.

  Cats. They’ll crawl up into the bathtub every time when the house catches on fire. I don’t know why they pick that place to die, there among the shower curtain and the shampoo. Small dogs will do it, too, and it’s not happy work to walk back out into the yard and tell the houseowners their pets didn’t make it. Little Clyde and Buddy dead in there in the bathtub. It’s pretty traumatic for the people involved, I’m sure. I don’t even want to think about something happening to Sam. Sam I’m sure would raise all kinds of hell barking, then dive through a window like Rin Tin Tin. I’ve never seen a more intelligent animal than Sam. I’ve about decided that dogs can think. Or I think Sam can, anyway.

  He’ll try to talk, too, but he can’t talk. He’ll just holler a bunch of crazy dog stuff that sounds like he’s trying to talk. And another thing is that he’s ruined, spoiled, completely rotten. It’s all MA and the children’s fault. If Billy Ray leaves here, Sam will go over to Mamaw’s (Esther Lee, MA’s mama) and get her to let him inside. Then when he hears Billy Ray come home, no matter what time of night it is, he’ll go to Mamaw’s door and scratch and paw and whine until she has to get out of bed and let him out. Then before long you’ll hear him whining and pawing and crying at our back doors, which are French-style, with glass in them, and it’s really disgusting to have to listen to it. I don’t mean that it has to be cold for him to want in. He just wants in. And MA and the kids will let him in. I don’t let him in. But they will. He’ll actually knock on the door, and put his face right up next to the glass, and kind of wall one eye at you, and give you this pitiful look, and whine. They think I’m mean to him because I won’t let him in. But that’s not it. I’ve never been mean to him, hell, I love him. It’s just that I hate to see a dog manipulate people. So usually they all beg for him to come in and I finally say, All right, damn it, let the little spoiled turd in. Then he goes back to the boys’ bedroom and gets in the bed with Billy Ray. Sleeps under the covers with him. It’s pretty disgusting. MA will go in there in the morning and wake up Billy Ray, and he’ll grunt, and Sam will grunt.

  They’ll do stuff like feed him ice cream and cookies, too. I swear he’s just like a kid. You can’t even enjoy a meal for him. He’ll stand up on his hind legs and beg for whatever you’re eating. Give you those mournful eyes. And finally he looks so pitiful and hungry you have to start feeding him off your plate or feel like a real bastard. He likes steak pretty well, shrimp, chicken. He’ll eat lasagna. He’ll eat just about anything out of your hand.

  Billy Ray’s got this big bluetick coon dog he got about six months ago, when he was still a pretty large puppy, pretty clumsy, real big feet and ears and all, and for a while Sam could knock him over and push him around, be a bully with him. He had the bluff on this puppy that weighed about forty pounds. He’d make out like he was going to eat his ass up, and the puppy would back off. Only now the coon dog’s grown. A lot. Now he’s hunting coons, and fighting them when he catches them. Wild coons. Which are like five handfuls of razor blades when they’re fighting. The bluetick’s named Jack. The only thing Sam can do to him now is try to bite his balls. That’s about all he can reach. But the bluetick’s going to get pissed off one of these days and probably bite his little nappy head off.

  We roll through the door of the truck bay, our warning lights already revolving, flashing on the sidewalk and the big oaks along the street and the iron picket fence around the house across the street. The traffic stops for us and we turn left and head south down North Lamar, and Dwight stands on the siren and we pick up speed and race toward the first stop light a quarter mile away as the cars pull off to one side or I take the middle of the street and go around them, watching everything, watching the road, my speed, watching for people with their windows rolled up and the air conditioner going, or rock and roll turned up loud on their tape players, people who may not be able to hear me coming up behind them, people who might slam on their brakes. I never run a red light. Nobody with any sense driving a fire truck would run the red light at North Lamar and Jefferson because you can’t see anything coming either way down Jefferson until you are under the light. The siren hurts our ears but Dwight stands on it and we stop and look both ways at Jefferson and then go on through, up to the Square where the road splits and both sides of the street can get blocked on you if people slam on their brakes and then you have to make your own road, go around somebody. The sound of the siren bounces off the high buildings on the Square and amplifies itself and now that we have everybody’s attention, we turn right and floor it down Jackson Avenue toward a boy who is strangling to death on his own blood this hot summer night.

  We catch the next light on green and blow the air horn just in case and then we can see the blue lights of the city police cars and the red lights of the ambulance and we slow down and pull in and stop the pumper in the street, put the pump in gear, apply the parking brake. I pick up the radio mike and report that we’re 10-7, engaged in an assignment, and then I report what we’re looking at, which is a white Ford Pinto on the right-hand side of the street, pointed the wrong way and wrapped around a telephone pole at the edge of the sidewalk. Dwight is out and pulling on his coat and gloves. Harry arrives behind us in the rescue truck and parks. I hang up the mike and get out, pull on my gloves, get my helmet from the compartment, and walk over and look into the car. The passenger door is open and a nurse is in the front seat with a young man who is lying across the buckets, jammed tight against the shifter, covered with blood, his legs twisted behind him in the smashed remains of the driver’s door. The nurse is jabbing a piece of surgical tubing down his throat, shouting, Breathe, baby, breathe!

  Harry is getting the entry saw out of the rescue truck and I walk back to the pump panel and pull the lever that opens the booster line, a rubberized one-inch handline that’s on a reel above the pump panel, and then I throttle the engine up and watch the pressure gauge until the needle sits steady on two hundred psi and then I walk off and leave it. Dwight pulls the line down with one hand and drags it over to the car and lays it down in the street. Harry is bringing the saw and I go back to where the nurse is working with the boy. She looks up at me and tells me that we’ve got to do something quick and I say, We’ll do all we can, lady. The boy is trying to breathe and she has almost as much blood on her as he does. He probably has internal i
njuries, something ruptured in his chest, and she keeps saying that he’s going to die before we can get him out. Here is this thing facing us again, this human and fragile thing called life wasting away before our eyes.

  This is in the early eighties, before the city decided that we needed to spend seventy-five hundred dollars for a Hurst Tool, the Jaws of Life, and all we have is the Ram Tool, which I’ve already mentioned is not worth a shit in a situation like this, a wreck of this magnitude. It’s only a hand-pumped hydraulic tool with various attachments. It has neither the power nor the speed. It won’t pull a car apart like taffy the way the Hurst Tool will. All we’ve got is the Ram Tool and the saw, so I walk around to the other side of the car where the door is bent into a U-shape against the telephone pole. For a moment I consider moving the car, calling a wrecker and yanking it off the pole, but then I tell Harry that we need to try and cut the door off. A whole lot of people are standing around watching us. I wish they’d all go away and let us do our work, but they’re not about to do that. Hell no. This is too good to miss. They’re going to stand right here and watch every fuckup we make.

  Harry gets the saw cranked and noses the carbide blade into the door and a shower of orange sparks starts flying around in a circle. We keep the hose ready in case gasoline ignites and I already know this isn’t going to work. The whole weight of the car is against the door and we won’t get it off without cutting down the pole. It doesn’t look possible to remove him. It doesn’t look possible that the boy could have gotten himself into this kind of shape. It looks like he’s going to die right here with all of us trying to prevent it.

  I tell them to keep sawing and I go back around to the other side of the car where the nurse is screaming for the boy not to die, shouting things at me, I don’t know what, I don’t listen, I don’t care what she’s saying, I’m looking at this car and trying to figure some way to get the boy out of it as fast as I can. I lean over her with my flashlight and look at his legs. They’re in that door behind him and the saw is running on the other side of the window, lighting up Harry’s face and the safety goggles he has on. The boy breathes a little and then his breath catches in his chest and he makes that strangling noise again and she jabs the thing down his throat again. It’s clogged with bubbles of air and blood and she keeps saying that we’ve got to do something, do something right now. She’s about to get on my nerves and I wish to hell I did know what to do. I’m inside the car, crawling around, looking.

  I get back out and look at the position of his body. And then I see it. He’s got to come straight up. He’s got to rise vertically out of that car like somebody levitating. The nurse tells me that they’ve got to call the rescue unit and I tell her, This is it, lady, this is the rescue unit and it’s the only one you’re going to get. I don’t show her my First Responder patch, I don’t tell her that I’ve been to the State Fire Academy to learn this shit, I don’t tell her that if the city would open up its billfold I’d carve this car up like a Christmas turkey. I just go around to the other side and tell the guys who work with me to cut off the saw and let’s get the windshield out.

  We cover the nurse and the patient up with a blanket and then we take two fire axes and start chopping through the windshield, going around the edges, trying not to get glass splinters in our eyes, trying to remember to keep our face shields down. We go all the way around the top of the windshield and down both sides and then push it out over the hood and tear it loose from the gasket and throw it into the street like a dirty carpet. Then I’m up on the hood and reaching down through the hole for the shifter he’s lodged against, that has his body hung. I push on it with all I have and it won’t give. Somebody takes the blanket off the nurse and her patient and she’s still working with him but he doesn’t sound any better. I push against the shifter and it won’t move. I say, Dwight, come here, help me. He crawls up beside me and lies down. I tell him that the boy is hung against the shifter, that we’ve got to bend it out of the way, but I’m not strong enough alone. I tell him to put his hand on mine on top of the shifter and he does. Dwight is a lot stronger than me and it starts to give. We push and strain, as hard as we can, and Dwight is nearly crushing my hand with his, but the shifter gives and bends over in the floor until it’s away from him and not holding him anymore. Somebody has pushed the wheeled stretcher up near the car and we all reach and lift while somebody pulls traction on the patient, just in case he has a broken neck, and we slide the half-backboard in behind him and strap him to it and out he comes, onto the stretcher, the nurse walking beside him still jabbing the thing in and out of his throat, the respirator inside the ambulance only a few seconds away now, and they strap him down and load him up and get in with him and the doors slam and the ambulance screams down the street, the lonely wail of it washing over us as we stand and watch it go and listen to it fade away toward the hospital south of town.

  I turn to Dwight and look at him. I’m glad he’s so strong. I’m glad the boy didn’t die. I understand why the nurse had no patience with us.

  We roll up our shit and we go home. No thanks is needed from anybody. The city thanks us twice a month.

  Now we are gathered in a little church in the woods, the yard of the church filled with muddy cars and muddy fire-trucks, and we have all driven up a muddy road and we are here to say our last goodbyes to Dwight, who lies in his coffin in front of the pulpit. He was strong, but he had high blood pressure, and he wasn’t careful about taking his medicine, and two days ago, when he was rabbit hunting with his uncle and his cousin, he had either a stroke or a heart attack and died quickly in the woods, before they could get him some help. I have never been in a black church before, and of all the hundreds of people here, the faces of firefighters in their uniforms are the only white faces.

  The church will not hold all the people who have come here. The church has no paint on the outside. I cannot believe that he is dead, but they open the coffin and there he lies, with his mustache, without the glasses he always wore, and a seventeen-year-old son bends over him with streaming eyes and kisses his cheek.

  The preacher is standing at the pulpit, but the service is not going to begin until everybody is seated. All the pews are full and people are still coming in. The funeral procession looked miles long. Chairs are brought in and set down in the aisles and people sit in them, maybe forty or fifty more. We sit in silence, sweating in the heat, the women fanning themselves with little cardboard fans on wooden sticks, things I haven’t seen or seen people use since I was a child in my own church and saw women do the same thing. The people stop coming in and somebody closes the door.

  From a curtain behind the pulpit a line of old women come in wearing choir robes. There’s maybe a dozen of them. They hold no hymnals in their hands and the organ sits dead and silent in the corner. The women sit down and put their hands in their laps and they begin singing. They begin singing like angels and they sing about Heaven and Jesus and the love of God, and the hair wants to go up on my neck because it is unearthly and beautiful and my ears love it like no singing I’ve ever heard, and the preacher stands tall in his black velvet robe with a face of stone and stares at the wall of the church. We sit enraptured and I look at the people in fine clothes, some still in work clothes, fresh from the job, all of us here for this wonderful music.

  The singing ends. Then it begins again. I don’t know how long it goes on. It stops again. It begins again. And finally it stops for good.

  The preacher is a huge man. He looks like Alex Haley, only blacker. This man is as black as midnight. He begins his sermon in a gentle voice, talking of how we all must one day throw off this mortal coil, the way Dwight already has, that his suffering is over, that God’s got a better world waiting. He talks of how he remembers Dwight in church as a child, how he saw him accept Jesus as his savior. He raises his voice a little and his words begin to assume a rhythm, and he starts to move, and we start to move a little with him. His voice gets louder and somebody says Amen. Somebody says, Yes,
Lord. His voice rises to a higher pitch and I can see people swaying. It’s going to be something. They start to shout and talk back to him and we keep quiet. There are two things going on here at one time. It’s looking as if it’s going to get out of hand. Pretty soon the preacher’s moaning and his voice has gotten high and tight and he’s caught up in it and the whole place is caught up in it and I’m caught up in it too and it’s all I can do to keep from shouting something out at him myself because he’s got me feeling something. The man’s a great preacher and he’s got all these people right in the palm of his hand and he’s making them jump and move and yell, Yeah! Amen! Tell it, brother! Sweet Jesus! I close my eyes and feel it. It goes on and on and it’s hot in the church and the little walls reverberate with sound until the preacher slows down like a clock unwinding and by then just about everybody’s crying, me too, no more Dwight.

  We carry the casket down a slippery hill, mud on the ladies’ shoes, black and white people walking together to the muddy hole we’re going to lower him into. We stand around while the preacher says his final words, while Dwight’s wife cries and their children cry. We all have little boutonnieres in our lapels and we take them off and put them in a small pile on top of a wreath of flowers that is there. They lower the casket and it comes to rest six feet down. There is a large pile of streaked clay with five or six shovels stuck into it. Nobody tells us to, but the firefighters pick up the shovels and we start shoveling the clay over him. It’s not even dirt. It will hardly fall off the shovel blade. Sometimes you have to shake it off. It lands in sticky clumps, sodden, wet, thumping loudly on his shiny casket. It takes a long time. We change positions, we pass the shovels around among us, we rest sometimes. It’s not a pretty place to be buried. The land is of poor quality, with nothing but scrubby trees and weeds around. It’s very hot. We keep shoveling. I’m off duty. And you can bet that I’m going to take my uniform shirt off and wear a clean T-shirt into Ireland’s and sit down and have a very large drink when I get back to Oxford.