Burning Down the House

by Russell Wangersky

  Even now, I can feel the claustrophobic roar of the flames all around, the way the heat would wallop into me, the unworldly rush of an otherwise explainable universe blowing apart in ripping flames of deep yellow and red.

  Here’s another little fact: if that falling fridge had hit me, or if the doorway had caved in, or if I had gotten my feet tragically caught in the torn-up basement floorboards, the fire service would have called me heroic. They would have been absolutely willing to complete the public fiction for me. They would have classed it as me having made “the ultimate sacrifice,” when the fact is I was only being stupid. The truth is, anyone in the fire service who looked at the situation would know it had been stupidity, but they would all call it courage anyway. And as hopeless as the effort would have been, they would even have come in after me.

  That’s the way it works.

  Firefighters are human, and they make mistakes—they do the wrong things, turn the wrong way, put their hands in the wrong places. People end up more seriously injured than they might have been, and sometimes people even end up dead. But no one is in a hurry to have firefighters be anything but big and strong and fearless.

  Firefighters don’t make bad decisions; what they make, so the fiction goes, is brave ones. They are expected to keep doing it, time after time. Everyone else is supposed to keep up that pretence. And for the most part we do.

  There’s no one to blame. You’re put in extremely high-stress situations, where lives depend on you making the right decisions; but more than that, they depend on someone making a decision, any decision. So a lot gets swept under the carpet, mistakes along with it.

  I’ve never, ever been questioned about a single thing I did on the fireground. No one has ever come to ask why I chose to send people into a building, or why I chose not to. Why I chose to approach a building from one side but not from the other. Paramedics and police have come back to accident scenes to trace diagrams of the marks left by crashing cars; they’ve asked me where I found victims, whether I found liquor bottles or smelled alcohol. But no one has ever asked me where I put my hands before I started CPR, or whether I thought I was doing it right.

  We close ranks because we know, if we ever start asking questions, those questions might come uncomfortably close to any one of us. There are tons of skeletons in anyone’s closet, tons of things that might have turned out radically differently—and radically better, too.

  The big three-storey farmhouse is gone now, but the concrete foundation is still there, and a regular breeze springs up from behind where the house used to be and runs down the hill towards a small pond. The pond was the kind of place we could have set up the portable pump to draw water, instead of trundling one of the two big trucks back and forth to the hydrant all night long, if only we’d known it was there.

  There’s a new fence made out of spruce longers across the hill on the side of the road where we ran our hoses, and a fresh thicket of small blueberry bushes is coming up on the edge of the hill, waxy flowers hanging downwards like bells or baggy underwear, the first sign that the forest is starting to win again.

  Inside the basement is probably now only long grass, the house essentially forgotten by every other living person, even its owner. It’s one more mistake I don’t feel I deserve to escape. Why? Because it was a bad decision, and I really deserved to get crushed by a fridge. But it would have been my family—and the other firefighters—who ended up paying the price.

  I shouldn’t have been in there in the first place, and I only got out by luck.

  And brave? Brave is great for movies.

  Once, a woman came up to me in my sons’ school as I was dropping the boys off, obviously a teacher, pulling a small wheeled suitcase with classwork in it.

  “I just wanted to say thank you,” she said. “I was almost a year out of school recovering.”

  She was shorter than me, dark brown hair and sharp creases near her eyes. I looked hard, but I couldn’t place her. I’ve always had trouble with faces.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said, and I admitted that I didn’t. “I was the woman whose car was pushed into the bus,” she explained, and then it made sense.

  I had been on my way to work, and she had been stopped behind a school bus with its red flashers lit. Someone driving up behind her had piled into the back of her car, forcing it ahead and into the bus. I had climbed into her car, held her neck and waited for help, telling her I was a firefighter. Over her shoulder I could see the kids in the back of the bus, peering down excitedly at us through the window and the emergency exit. The bus driver had kept the doors of the bus closed even though everyone was up and out of their seats.

  “You were right about my neck,” she said. “It was worse than I thought.” We stood awkwardly for another moment, two people with nothing other than a few minutes of crisis in common. “So, thanks.”

  Then she headed for the teachers’ lounge, wheeling her case behind her.

  I walked away with tears pricking at my eyes.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Often you’re making decisions in the dim light cast out from the dashboard, long before you get to the scene. You already know the things you’re willing to do, the chances you’re willing to take.

  Whether you’re willing to work with what you’ve got, whether you’re willing to take chances that the trainers would never, ever accept.

  I’ve calculated the slender equation of chance a thousand times, wondering just exactly what I’d be willing to do if I came around the corner on the highway and met up with an accident where someone needed me to stop their bleeding but I didn’t have any gloves. Do you take the risk and try, or do you walk away and live with the inevitable guilt?

  The worst was heading for my co-worker Craig’s house, because I knew his father had collapsed and I also knew I didn’t have all my gear—so, on the way, I reasoned with myself that he was in his seventies and it wasn’t likely he would have hep C or HIV.

  Craig and Fred Jackson are brothers, and every now and then one of them—usually Fred—will introduce me to someone by saying, “This is Russell—you know what he did? He did CPR on my dad.”

  I did—I just don’t want to be reminded of it. I don’t have to be reminded, because I’ll always remember it anyway, because it’s not the sort of thing that ever gets forgotten. Every time I shave, I could draw a diagram of his living room in the mist on the mirror.

  Craig was a reporter in my newsroom, and one day he jumped up from his desk. I watched the phone fall from his hands—literally fall—and bounce off his desk. Craig standing, yelling, “Call 911 to my house! My dad’s down on the floor!” Then he was running from the newsroom.

  I ran after him, thinking that he shouldn’t drive—nothing more than that, just that he shouldn’t drive.

  The road was wet, greasy wet, glassy wet, and I put the light on the dashboard, white and red, white and red, spinning, and the toggle switch for the siren was right there by my left knee—I can feel it now, know the angle my arm needs to make to reach down and touch it. I’ve turned that siren on in the pitch-black on the first try—up for yelp, down for wail. The switch was silver, and the end of the switch was a smooth teardrop shape. I can feel it now, feel it between my fingers—and even before I look down I know exactly how far apart the index finger and thumb of my left hand will be from one another.

  I ran three sets of lights—Canada Drive, Blackmarsh Road and Mundy Pond Road—and I can remember slowing for each one, looking both ways for traffic, feeling the front of my pickup nosing down as I hit the brakes hard. I can remember seeing the faces of startled drivers at each intersection, and I can remember that the road was as shiny and black as new licorice. I also remember that I didn’t ever touch the siren.

  I parked on the wrong side of the road, Prowse Avenue, my driver’s-side wheels thumped up over the curb onto the grass, and we ran in through the shining rain. Just inside the door, he was lying there.

  Craig had to step over his
father to get to his mother in the kitchen. I remember thinking, coming through that door, that this time I had really fenced myself in; that, just by being there, there was nothing I could do except help; that I had no choice but to do something. With that feeling came a fear I’d get sometimes when I was the first one on a scene. Even with all my training, there was a feeling somewhere between indecision and a crisis of confidence. I’d think: “It’s too bad, guys. It’s too bad you got the fake firefighter.”

  I was alone in the front hall with him, an overweight man, round-bellied, stretched out like an unlikely doormat right there in front of me, his small dog wheeling and barking. He was lying in a place I knew would always be remembered by his family, every time they came in that door, as if his outline were indelibly painted right there on the floor.

  It was harder still because Craig’s parents lived with him and his family in the same small house. I remember thinking, Let me save this one. They’ll never get over this, not in this house, not in this home. Just let me save this one. Let this be my one in ten.

  I remember his purple mouth, the rasping last breaths that shook the great curve of his stomach. Stomach breaths, reflex breaths, those great shudders that you dread seeing, the ones they sometimes call a death rattle. His lips were darkening to blue, his face devolving through red to purple, and the ambulance still hadn’t come.

  Craig was yelling into the phone all over again for the para-medics—“ Just get here, just get here fast”—and his mother was still sitting in a chair in the kitchen, resigned, her back to us, and the dog was circling the living room, barking, sometimes pulling at my pants leg with its teeth.

  I remember shouting to Craig between breaths, telling him to inform the 911 operator that it was a Code-4 medical, which is emergency room shorthand for moments—mere instants—from death, and I hoped he hadn’t ever heard enough in the newsroom, on the scanner, to understand what I meant. It was my own little head shake, but I didn’t know if anyone would recognize it as such.

  One, two, three, four, five.

  It’s easy, you think in a detached way, to understand why CPR is taught the way it is, like a mnemonic, but in numbers. So you won’t forget. So your hands take over and your mind checks out. Or tries to. It tries desperately to get away from all the information it’s collecting, information it will let spill out later in your dreams.

  One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five. Tilt the head back. Pinch the nose. Breathe, breathe. One, two, three, four, five.

  Then help came through the door all at once, scattering equipment and medical packaging. Paramedics with their trauma kit and heart-start monitor, the blue nylon bag that always holds the suction kit. Things were banging and crashing on the hardwood floor, the noise angular and sharp, far from the rolling wail of grief.

  The first paramedic had her gloves on already, blue gloves, her short hair tied back, and I remember that she was startlingly attractive. With one pass of the scissors, from bottom to top, she had the rest of his shirt off, so that he was lying on the floor naked from the waist up.

  “He’s packed solid,” she said, taking the suction kit and clearing vomit from his throat. I knew all about that already, I just couldn’t do anything about it. You know when you’re breathing into some kind of obstruction, because your cheeks puff right up despite your effort.

  She peeled the sticker covers from the heart monitor pads, stuck them onto his chest. Twice the monitor said his heart was beating again, and she said, “He’s back,” and you wonder, like you always do, who is going to be back, what kind of person, and if they will be anything like the person their family used to know.

  Because it’s always hard to get enough air through. It’s harder still when the airway is blocked, harder still when it’s taken so long to get there.

  Then, twice, his heart stopped again, and the monitor croaked its mechanical message, “Start compressions, start compressions.”

  The paramedic’s partner was fighting with the gurney, trying to get the wheeled stretcher in through the crowded front hall.

  People were still coming in, family and friends answering desperate calls as fast as they could, and the last man through the door swept everything up in his arms. Craig’s dad’s heart was beating at that point, and I was kneeling, sweating, my hands flat on my knees.

  The last man through the door kicked the storm door open again, and with a heave all the hockey sticks, the coats, the coat rack, everything that was wrapped up in his arms, was thrown out into the melting snow. As simple and thoughtless as a shrug, because it had to be done.

  It was like a switch thrown in my head: Don’t think, just do.

  Too late, though. Too, too much thinking already.

  I remember going in the ambulance, Craig’s father’s chest hooked up to the heart monitor, and the paramedic telling me that I was doing fine, that the chest compressions were clear and sharp and strong on the monitor.

  That was the first time I’d ever heard that. About an inch and a half to two inches, they tell you, for some compressions, but everyone is different; maybe the person has a big barrel chest, maybe they’re fat. With an infant you use two fingers, and you only press down about half an inch to an inch, your fingers at the centre of the chest just half an inch below the nipples. Everything so neat, so fine, so perfect, so small, that you feel like you are imagining it all. But believe me, you don’t ever want to have to think about that. Not ever. Even when you’re practising on the training doll, it just comes home too quickly, goes stomping right up the stairs and looks into the crib at your own baby.

  There’s a chrome bar that runs along the ceiling in an ambulance, and everything in the narrow, cramped space is planned and polished and ready. Spread your legs, hold on to that bar, and you’re at exactly the right height to keep doing CPR with one hand, while the ambulance throws itself around corners and you keep your balance, holding on to the ceiling bar. The ambulance tries to throw you off again and again, but it can’t, like you’re back there in a rodeo, and the paramedic driving is shouting back at you, telling you where you are, working the radio, letting the hospital know how close you are.

  Eventually, when the sweat is pouring down into your eyes, when every single thing has already happened, you’re suddenly at the hospital— and it all ends. Just like that. Period. The End.

  And everything you’re doing is taken away from you. Not passed off, not picked up by someone else, but somehow taken away.

  Standing there, watching the doctors wheel Craig’s father away from the ambulance entrance, with them still pressing on his chest, watching the doors swing closed behind the gurney, feeling my arms still trying to do compressions, and knowing then, even without the shake of a head. Knowing that I’d actually done it all right, and he’d died anyway.

  I knew from their stride. I knew from their faces. I knew from the difference in their movements, the difference between trying and really trying. I knew when the minister came out and grabbed Craig by the elbow.

  And I knew Craig didn’t know, so I went out and flagged down a cab.

  Disengage. I went back to Craig’s house to get my jacket, and my truck was still on the curb, and the red and white light was still circling blindly on the dashboard.

  I remember that Craig’s wife and his mother were still in the living room, and my coat was still lying on the floor where I had thrown it, and I don’t even remember what I said to them, although I can remember going out the door and snapping the front of my jacket against the wet cold.

  Even now I can feel the heat of the emergency light, hot on the heel of my left hand, when I took it off the dash and pulled its plug out of the cigarette lighter where it had been spinning, waiting for me to get back.

  The next morning his obituary was in the paper, and I found out his name was Frederick. At the bottom, “A very special thank you to . . .” and my name.

  I have that obituary somewhere. It was folded in my wallet for a while, the newspri
nt soft and ragged at the edges, starting to yellow, the ink smudging from body heat. Now I’m not sure where it is.

  Sometime after I’m gone, someone will unfold that scrap of paper and wonder just what it was all about.

  Special thanks.

  Special thanks for nothing.

  The truth is, no matter how often I plan it in my head ahead of time, no matter how many times I work through the steps and the process and the patterns—no matter how much I hope—I can’t help you.

  If you fall down on the ground in front of me, I know that my head will click over from watching to doing, that it will act automatically, that my hands will do what’s needed to stop arterial bleeding or choking. My hands will even start doing CPR, and a part of me will sit back as if ticking things off on a checklist, watching every compression, making sure each push is deep enough and that it’s done in the right pattern. But I don’t have any faith that my actions will actually do any good.

  I used to be sure that I could help—I used to be sure that just doing something would help. I still wanted to—God, I wanted to— but I couldn’t.

  I just didn’t think I could help anyone.

  Not even myself.

  Especially not myself.

  The caller told 911they had seen the red cat’s-eye reflection of tail lights where there weren’t supposed to be tail lights, caught by their headlights and out away from the road and on a steep hill down into Portugal Cove. The caller wasn’t concerned enough to stop, though, so we had to take a couple of trips down the hill before we found the car, sunk down into the trees below the guardrail.

  The young driver had miscalculated the turn, missed the start of the guardrail, and had launched the car out over an incline and into a stand of fir trees. Looking under it with the flashlights, we could see that the back wheels were on the ground, and the front wheels were in the air. However it had happened, the top of a huge fir tree had come straight through the windshield, a tree trunk four inches across going right through the gap between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat like a spear and straight out through the back window. The entire car was packed tight with the bushy branches and with the thick, rich smell of the fir, and it seemed like someone had tried to bring a Christmas tree home by stuffing it completely inside their car. Any door you opened, tree branches burst out like a jack-in-the-box.