The Smoke Room

by Earl Emerson

  Tonight I am crazy with fright. Fright that Tronstad will go into the fire without me and end up maimed. Fright that people will die because of my absence, that Sears will hound me out of the department. Fright that I will become the department laughingstock.

  Sears is a no-nonsense, by-the-book officer who does not tolerate screwups, and this is the pièce de résistance of screwups. A week after he met me, Lieutenant Sears said something that still sticks in my craw. “Gum, you mean well, but you make mistakes. Most of them are small ones, but every once in a while you pull a doozy.” He arched an eyebrow at the word doozy. “Watch yourself.” At the time I’d considered his words a huge insult, but I’ve since proved him right.

  I switch on the portable radio and stuff it into the chest pocket on my bunking coat, each transmission making me more frenzied than the last.

  The dispatcher says, “Engine Twenty-nine. This is a report of a house fire. Several callers have stated the occupants may still be inside.”

  Lieutenant Sears announces over the radio that he is at the location on Arch Place SW. “Flames showing from the first floor of a two-story wood-frame building approximately forty by fifty. No exposures. We’re laying a preconnect and establishing Arch Command. Engine Thirty-six, lay a supply and a backup line. Engine Thirty-two, you’ll be the RIT team. Ladder Eleven, split your crew. Do a search and rescue, and ventilate.”

  Sears is good on the radio. He hasn’t been at 29’s long enough for us to judge how he will react on the fire ground, but around the station he talks a good fire, and tonight his radio voice is accelerated but calm, just the way it should be.

  Because of a preponderance of oversized trucks and SUVs parked on either side, the streets around Arch Place are even narrower than usual. When Engine 29 stops, it effectively plugs the thoroughfare so no other vehicles can get past.

  The house is on the east side of the street, flames boiling out a picture window on the near side, heavy black smoke pouring from the front door. I swerve into a tight space between two colossal SUVs and pop out of my Subaru like a cork out of a bottle, rolling onto the pavement. I pick myself up and sprint up the shadowy street, toward Engine 29.

  Highlighted by flames, a silhouette in a helmet and bunking coat walks through the yard in front of the house. From his military bearing I know it is Lieutenant Sears, who oddly enough has never been in the military. Johnson will be working the pump panel on the engine. Tronstad’s job will be to take the nozzle, lay out all two hundred feet of hose, and go inside.

  I don’t see any sign of Tronstad, but I spot an inch-and-three-quarters line stretching from the rear of Engine 29 across the yard and inside the front door of the house. Normally, Tronstad and I would be together on the end of that hose line, pushing it into the house until we find the seat of the fire, partners to the end. That is our contract. In the fire department you have a partner and you remain in contact with him or her throughout a fire, a shared system of responsibility the Seattle department adopted subsequent to a series of firefighter deaths years ago.

  Because of me, Tronstad is alone.

  When I climb into my seat in the crew cab to get my air mask and backpack, Robert Johnson is on the catwalk in front of me working the pump panel. I slip on my MSA backpack, put my face piece on, activate the bottle, and hook up the air.

  Inside the house, flames lick a window to the right of the front door.

  The hose line snakes through the smoky front doorway, but there is no sign of Tronstad. No indication water is being applied to the fire. The smoke is black and hot. Through it I can see only part of the house and the front doorway. For all I know, he’s already tits up.

  As I race across the yard, I bump into a large man in a bathrobe and slippers, hitting him so hard, we both tumble in the grass. We’ve been told not to run on the fire ground, and this is one of the reasons.

  “You see another firefighter go inside?” I ask as I get up and head for the front door. “Is this your house?”

  “I live across the street. The Ranklers live here.”

  “You see a firefighter go inside?”

  “A while back.”

  “Was he alone?” God, what a stupid question. Of course he was alone. There is only one rig at the scene, and I’ve already spotted two of the three firefighters on it, Johnson at the pump panel and Lieutenant Sears in the yard. “Did they get out? The people who live here. Have you seen them?”

  “I don’t know. The man’s in a wheelchair. They’re—”

  “Two people?”

  “Yes. A man and his wife.”

  I heel around and race toward the front door, trying not to trip over the hose. To my surprise, I cross paths with Lieutenant Sears on the porch and almost knock him over. I am out of control.

  “Where’s your line?” Sears yells. “Don’t come up here without a line. And where’s your partner?”

  Without answering, I crawl through the front door, where the interior of the house is as dark as the inside of a nut. When you’re in a house that’s on fire, the rest of the world ceases to exist. You have no friends, no family, no past, and no goals except to do your job and get out. You maintain concentration because if you don’t, the fire will spank you. I’ve never been in a good house fire and been able to think about anything but the here and now, never wanted to think about anything else. Afterward, probably because you’ve been closer to death than at any other time, you realize you’ve never been more alive, either.

  The doorway is dark with rushing hot gasses and smoke that looks thick enough to ride a surfboard on. I squat low under the heat and follow the hose line to the left. I’m moving like a mad dog. A mere five feet inside, I bump into a man and knock him against the wall. I know it is Tronstad by the way he curses when my plastic helmet smashes against the hard air cylinder on his back. I’ve never been so hyped. Not at a fire. Not the time my mother and I went to San Francisco and got mugged. Not the time I fell off a cliff when I was eleven. If I wasn’t twenty-four years old, I would think I was having a heart attack.

  “What the hell! If that’s you Engine Thirty-six fucks, you can just get out of my face.” Tronstad’s angry voice tugs me back to reality.

  “It’s me.”

  “Who the fuck is ‘me’?”

  “Gum. How much have you searched?”

  “I got turned around. I’m in here alone, man. I been alone fuckin’ forever.”

  “The neighbor thinks there’s somebody in here. Where have you searched?”

  My helmet light is on and I have the feeling Tronstad’s is on as well, but there’s so much smoke, I can’t see his light or the beam from mine. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a good house fire where there isn’t a truck company ventilating, but because they aren’t there to ventilate, I can’t see ten inches in front of my face.

  We hear flames in the rooms to the right of the front door. The fire is beginning to lap over our heads with a soft crackling sound, and I can feel the heat increasing. We don’t have long. When you open the door on a house fire, you give it additional oxygen, which causes the fire to build, and if you don’t get water on it right away, it grows like a son of a bitch.

  “How much have you searched?”

  When he doesn’t reply, I crawl over him like a halfback swimming through a sea of linemen for a touchdown. I don’t have time to wait for his answer. I head into the living room.

  I know what the layout of the house probably is from having been in so many of these remodeled prewar houses on aid calls. Somewhere between me and the kitchen will be a stairwell leading up.

  Like a madman I search the rooms at a breakneck pace. I am stronger, faster, smarter, and crazier than a slaughterhouse rat, and more focused than I’ve ever been in my life. I crawl on my hands and knees, performing a frantic left-wall search of the rooms, knocking over lamps and chairs and anything that gets in my way, plunging through rooms like a burglar hyped on methamphetamines.

  To the left of the doorway is a c
orridor, which is where I’ve met and trampled Tronstad. Next is a living room filled with furniture I identify only by touch: couches and coffee tables. After that I encounter a small dining room, then the kitchen. I storm through them all on my hands and knees. It is far too hot to stand up. Toward the rear of the house, off the kitchen, I encounter a closed door.

  When I try to open it, the door jams against an object.

  The house is clean and tidy, so I don’t expect any doors to be blocked. I stand up in the heat and ram my shoulder into the door, breaking it apart. As I lever the door open, I am barely able to squeeze in. Blocking the entrance is a wheelchair with a man in it, unconscious, slumped over, his head and neck forming a wild distortion of normal human body mechanics.

  I pull the chair back, kick the door out of the way, and wheel him through the smoky house the way I came in. We bump into objects in the smoke, but after about a minute of crashing into furniture, I manage to trundle the heavy wheelchair and its cargo across the hose line in the hallway and outside onto the porch. His white hair is combed straight back and is neat enough for a portrait.

  Behind me in the house I hear somebody opening the bale on a nozzle, and water strikes the ceiling hard. I recognize Tronstad’s style—Tronstad, who’d been a firefighter in the Air Force before joining the Seattle department. We are taught to dispense just enough water to put the flames out, never to drown a fire, especially when working inside. A cubic foot of water turns into 1700 cubic feet of steam, and the steam smothers the fire—thus you put the fire out without causing water damage. Dry floors after a fire signal you’ve done your job correctly.

  There are more crews on the scene now, and one of the firefighters in the yard sees me and heads toward the wheelchair while I duck back through the smoke. The neighbor said there were two people inside. I have to find the other one.

  Even though the house is as dark and smoky as it was on my first traverse, I make a beeline for the bedroom where I found the man, moving with more confidence now that I’ve been through these rooms once.

  There is no one else in the bedroom.

  I get lucky and locate stairs at the back of the house. The air in the house grows hotter as I climb the carpeted steps. The smoke is denser, if that is possible. I’ve been sweating since before I left the station, but now I feel the heat radiating off my equipment as my gear begins to grow hot. Against my neck, the collar of my bunking coat feels like toast just out of the oven.

  At the top of the stairs, I swing my arms in a wide swath but find only carpet. I turn right. The first door I come to is closed. It turns out to be a closet. I find a window and break it with my portable radio. The glass panes splatter on the rooftop outside like falling crystal. I now hear Engine 29’s pump outside. I am sweating in my gear, growing weaker with each passing moment.

  I turn and begin working my way down the hallway, past the stairs. On my right I find a doorway; inside, there’s a body on the floor, a woman, tiny and dressed in nightclothes. Shaking produces no results. She is out cold. I lean over to listen for breathing but hear nothing. It is hotter up here than it was downstairs, and my helmet and gear are so hot I find myself wriggling around inside the suit to avoid skin contact with it.

  Still on my knees, I pull her outside the swing path of the door. I haul her a few feet, then, working like a grizzly dragging a fresh kill, move forward, drag her to my new position, then move forward again. Her backside is going to be raw, but I am alone and it is too hot to stand up.

  “Ted!” I yell. “I need help. Ted! I’ve got a victim.”

  Tronstad does not reply, and if there are other firefighters in the house, I cannot hear them.

  As I drag her toward the stairs, my head fills with stupid thoughts: that this is the strangest thing in the world, to be dragging a woman I’ve never seen out of a burning house. That I’ve been trained for just this event and after two years of waiting I’m now doing a genuine rescue. That she will not survive. That I should have been here five minutes sooner, and that if I had been, Tronstad and I would have saved her life.

  Striving to protect her neck and spine, I drag her down the stairs. Her body thumps on each stair. I’m not sure she is breathing, but it makes little difference to this process. Alive or dead, I will get her outside.

  Downstairs near the front door, Tronstad sees my victim, drops the nozzle, and takes the woman’s legs. I take her arms from behind, locking her wrists in front of her torso, and together we carry her into the yard as three firefighters in full bunkers and MSA bottles charge up onto the porch.

  We carry her to the center of the lawn and lay her down. Tronstad drops her feet and rips off his helmet and face piece and yells, “Somebody bring a vent kit! Gum’s got another victim here.”

  Twenty feet away an empty wheelchair sits beside a team of firefighters doing CPR on the man I brought out earlier. One of the CPR team is the neighbor I knocked down—a local doctor, I learn later—nose still crusted with blood from our collision.

  We begin working on the woman. She isn’t breathing, and neither Tronstad nor I can find a pulse.

  When you do CPR on somebody, it’s not like on TV where they have a shirt on. The first thing you do is bare the chest. Then there’s the electrodes, one under the right clavicle and one below the left nipple, on the ribs. Tronstad rips her nightgown open and begins ninety seconds of CPR, the current protocol.

  Somebody brings vent kits, and we hook her up to the electrodes on the Physio-Control Lifepak. I get out the plastic bag mask and begin pumping air into her lungs, working in sync with Tronstad, two breaths after every fifteen of his compressions. Eventually more firefighters and a medic assist in the resuscitation effort. Tronstad continues the chest compressions. I stick with the bag mask, forcing oxygenated air into her lungs.

  Under the direction of the Seattle fire paramedic, we shock her three times, beginning CPR anew after each shock. Johnson spells Tronstad on the chest compressions while I shrug off proposals of relief. As I kneel over her and use the bag mask, I try not to drip sweat onto her.

  A pretty woman, she looks to be in her early sixties.

  We shock her again, but she doesn’t come around. Across the yard they aren’t having any better luck with the man.

  This is my fault. I saw off a piece of ass, and my negligence kills two people.

  These two citizens have done nothing more than entrust their lives to the city. I’ve been hired by the city to fight fires and save lives. I’ve been trained and sworn in, and while my duties and responsibilities on the tailboard are minimal, my failure has resulted in this fiasco. I deserve to be jailed. Buggered. Hanged. You name it. They can’t devise a punishment severe enough for me.

  Finally, after what seems like hours but what I later learn is twenty minutes, after several firefighters have offered to spell me with the bag mask and I have refused each, our patient is pronounced dead by a medic, confirmed by a doctor on the phone, and we are told to cease CPR.

  Somebody takes the Laerdal bag mask out of my hands and speaks gently.

  “She’s gone, man. You did your best.”

  Eventually I stand and remove my MSA backpack. I am in another space. Another time. For a few minutes I am as disembodied and removed from this world as the woman at my feet.

  It is hard to imagine any more crap falling out of the sky anytime soon.

  5. GET OUT THE UMBRELLA, PAL

  ACROSS THE YARD they are packing the man from the wheelchair onto a gurney and running him down the street, to the rear of Medic 32, one firefighter following along doing chest compressions, another at the head with the bag mask.

  It turns out only Engine 29 and Engine 36 have responded directly to the address. Engine 32, Ladder 11, Medic 32, and Battalion 7 have all gone wrong and arrived late. One of many bad addresses in our district, this Arch Place is located about seven blocks from another Arch Place, and the two aren’t directly connected. Most of the response, including Chief Abbott, who’d been at Station
32 when the alarm came in, followed the relief driver on Engine 32 to the wrong location.

  To make matters worse, the other Arch Place is a narrow, contorted street that once populated with oversized fire apparatus becomes a nightmare to navigate. The mistake costs the bulk of our incoming response units between six and ten minutes in lost time, which explains why we had no help inside.

  Unbuttoning my bunking coat until I feel the cool night air kissing my wet shirt, I walk over to Engine 29 and sit on the step below our crew cab. The motor is still roaring. Firefighters from Ladder 11 have set up a powerful gasoline-driven fan in the doorway of the fire house, quickly clearing the rooms of smoke. The fire had been tapped while we were outside doing CPR. Engine 36 is doing mop-up.

  Through the side yard between the houses, I note an iridescent slice of downtown Seattle lit up like a ten-year-old’s birthday cake. Trying to hypnotize myself into a better frame of mind, I focus on the city until it becomes a blur of light. Having started off as arguably the best night of my career, this has rapidly segued into my worst, and possibly my last.

  While I languish on the sideboard of Engine 29, two firefighters from Aid 14 lift the dead woman onto a gurney and wheel her away into the darkness.

  Civilians are walking across the lawn, gawking at the broken-out windows of the house, ogling the bodies. Ogling me. Somebody needs to put up some fire-scene tape.

  From across the yard, Tronstad watches me. Later in the rehab area he begins gabbing and joking with firefighters from the other units. It doesn’t help my spirits to see him so carefree and lighthearted. But Tronstad is a me-me kind of guy and can be incredibly blasé about somebody else’s misfortune.