by Sean Flynn
In the dark, Mike slid his hands to the end of the hose, found the nozzle, and yanked the lever back. Water tore out like cannon fire, jerking the line, forcing it one way, then another, as if the hose was alive, a serpent fighting to get loose. Mike pinned a length of it beneath his back and clamped the rest between his left arm and rib cage, wrestling until he had the nozzle aimed straight up at the ceiling. For the next fifteen seconds—or it could have been five or fifty, because a man can lose track of time when he's trying not to die—Mike washed the air above him, scattering hundreds of gallons of water into the void. But he wasn't getting wet. None of the water was splashing back down. He knew it was turning to steam, a mist that would eventually settle on him like a searing fog. But 212 degrees of steam was better than 1,500 degrees of fire.
For an instant, the flames receded. The bright orange disappeared in a shroud of black smoke, the air finally cooled enough not to burn. Mike had punctured the fire's flanks, sent it into a temporary retreat, the way an army would fall back to regroup. Except a fire regrouped in only seconds, not hours or days. In one quick motion, Mike slammed the nozzle shut, twisted onto his knees, and started crawling, his shins banging off the floor, his hands slapping along the hose line. He covered forty feet like a sprinter, moving so fast in the dark he smashed his head into the fire door just to the left of the opening where the hose slipped out. He could hear his nozzle man screaming. “Where's Mike? Where the fuck is Mike?” Then he saw two pairs of gloved hands pulling at the fire door, wrenching it open just enough for the lieutenant to scramble into the hallway. It rolled shut behind him.
Mike slumped against a wall. His two men were sitting on the floor, wide-eyed, panting. They hadn't meant to leave him alone—firefighters, good ones, never leave a man alone in a fire, and Mike knew these were good men. They had thought he was bailing out with them. That's what they'd been yelling about, the words Mike couldn't hear over the rumbling of the rollover.
Mike stared at them, his breath coming in great, labored gulps. Finally, he said, “Holy fuck.” He stared some more and said it again, hoarse, almost a whisper: “Fuck.”
From behind the door, he could hear another roar, the sound of the room exploding. If he'd been inside, Mike knew, he'd be dead. He considered that, but only for an instant. “Sometimes you have to bring an extra pair of shorts to work,” he liked to say. And that was okay. Every fireman, unless he was a fool, sometimes got scared. But they never expected to die. Because, truth be told, they hardly ever did.
2
THE LATE NOVEMBER SUN SANK BEHIND THE GREEN STEEL trestle of the interstate and the empty warehouses behind it and, farther off in the western distance, the forested tops of stubby mountains that creased the middle of Massachusetts like a scoliotic spine. Mike steered his Buick into the low, gold light of the afternoon, squinting behind his thin-framed spectacles when the rays stabbed through breaks in the landscape, between the squat domed spires of Union Station and the beams holding up the highway and the narrow gaps separating the triple-deckers. The few strands of cinnamon left in his silver hair caught the light, glinted like bronze threads.
“Where are you going?” Joanne asked. She sat next to him, fidgeting with the visor, trying to block the glare. She was a small woman, not much more than five feet tall, which put her face, perfectly round with dimples pressed into her cheeks and an upturned nose, in the bright gap between the dashboard and the visor. When she narrowed her eyes, her dimples deepened and her nose crinkled just below the bridge, the same way as when she smiled.
“I'm taking Franklin over to Grafton,” Mike said. “It's faster.”
Joanne shrugged. Mike knew the roads in Worcester better than she did, the back alleys and uncluttered lanes that bypass the arteries clogged with late-afternoon traffic. Firemen knew all the shortcuts, the routes that would shave a few seconds off the race to the flames. After twenty-seven years on the job, working out of stations all over the city, Mike had figured out the shortest path from any point in the city to any other, and committed most of them to memory. He was kind of a geek that way. When he was a younger man, a rookie, Mike would walk the blocks around his first station, Winslow Street, with his toddler daughter strapped to his back, noting the location of every fire hydrant. The police thought it was weird enough that they stopped him once or twice, wanting to know why he was casing the neighborhood. Mike would takes his notes home, spread an oversize map on the living room floor and plot all the hydrants with a black marker. It used to drive Joanne nuts, coming home from her shift at the hospital to find her husband crawling around with a pen, the bed unmade, dishes unwashed, baby Kate burbling on the floor next to him.
Kate was twenty-three now, a college student in Washington, D.C. A vegetarian, wouldn't even eat poultry. In a few days, she would be home for Thanksgiving, which was why Mike and Joanne were driving across the city. There was a Middle Eastern bakery on Grafton Hill that made the finest Syrian bread and the best damned spinach pies in central Massachusetts. Kate would eat spinach pie.
Mike turned left onto Franklin Street, passing under the trestle of Interstate 290 and into the shadows of an old warehouse district. Fifty yards up Franklin, Mike took his right hand off the steering wheel and pointed a thick finger ahead and to the right. “See that building?” he said.
Joanne looked where he pointed. She couldn't have missed it if she'd tried. Worcester Cold Storage was a colossus of brick and mortar, wide as a city block and more than eighty feet tall. It was actually two buildings, connected by a common wall and laid out like a fat L, but from her angle, a dead-on view of the front from the curb, it looked like a massive cube.
“Yeah,” she said. “What about it?”
“It scares me.”
Joanne looked again. She'd seen that warehouse a thousand times before and never thought it was particularly spooky. It was a landmark, looming over Worcester just east of downtown for four generations. When she was a child, the blocks around it had rumbled and screeched with trucks and railcars, and the stench of offal and blood and diesel hung close to the ground. Hundreds of men labored in a dozen buildings, carving cattle and hogs into steaks and pork chops, fresh cuts that were stacked in the refrigerated warehouses. The meat cutters, like nearly every other industry in Worcester, had moved out of town by the end of the seventies. The cold storage businesses lingered for a few more years, but by the late eighties they were closed as well, the few windows along one stairwell and in front of the old office sealed with plywood and nails, the steel doors on the loading docks padlocked and chained. All that remained were the shells, monoliths of ocher and russet.
Worcester Cold Storage was the biggest of them all, dominating the abandoned abattoirs and freight depots and, in the shadow of its western wall, a small sliver of a diner called the Kenmore. It even dwarfed Interstate 290, eight concrete lanes that cleaved through the center of the city and passed only a couple dozen yards from the sheer brick facade of the warehouse. If anything, the highway gave it a grander scale; in a fluke of perspective, the guardrails of the eastbound lanes underlined the logo—WORCESTER COLD STORAGE AND WAREHOUSE CO.—painted near the top in giant white letters. Everyone in town knew that building, precisely where it was and what it looked like, if only because no one could avoid passing it in traffic.
“It scares you,” Joanne repeated. “Really. Why?”
“No windows.”
Mike said it casually, a statement of obscure fact. He wasn't immediately frightened, viscerally afraid, like he was that night on Jacques Street, his heart banging against his ribs, his lungs gasping short, shallow breaths. This fear was pragmatic, an educated projection of potential calamity, like that of an engineer who sees the future collapse of a bridge by looking at its badly drawn blueprints.
Joanne studied the building again, trying to focus it through her husband's eyes, a fireman's eyes. A lot of buildings scared firemen, if only because they had learned to mentally overlay the walls and foundations with heat, smo
ke, and flames. Civilians looked at a strip mall and saw a dry cleaner, a convenience store, and a deli, separate businesses lined up in a row. Firemen saw one long box divided into individual compartments connected by a single airspace between the roof and the dropped ceilings, a passage for flames to sneak from one shop to the next. Where civilians saw a hospital, firemen saw a couple hundred sick people who would need to be carried out, some tethered to respirators that couldn't be disconnected. A Wal-Mart or a Home Depot, through a fireman's prism, became a stockpile of flammable synthetics and explosive chemicals stored under a roof held up by open-web bar joists, a supporting structure that was light and strong but that in the heat of a fire could collapse in less than ten minutes and with little warning. “If that ever goes up,” firemen would say, nodding toward a shuttered mill or a fully occupied high-rise, “I hope I'm not working. When it goes up, I hope I'm not on.”
Mike had to worry about such buildings. He was a district chief now, in charge of the entire northern half of the city for his shift; at every working fire, he would be the initial supervisor, deciding how to attack and when to retreat. No fire was routine, but most were predictable and, given enough time and rogue sparks, could be practiced. Hundreds of the city's ubiquitous triple-decker houses had caught fire during the past couple of decades, and the next one to go up probably wouldn't burn much differently than all the others before it.
Worcester Cold Storage was a different beast altogether. The sheer size of it was intimidating. A fire running loose inside had too many places to hide and too many places to spread, wide pastures of littered floors on which to grow and thrive. A small fire, found quickly, could be eliminated. A big fire, one that got a jump on the men and slipped through the hallways and into the elevator shafts, flanking, surrounding, would be impossible to control. Worst of all were the unbroken walls, blank stacks of brick rising from the pavement. The building had been designed to hold in cold, which meant it would also retain heat, tremendous temperatures. That was also why there were so few windows, only a handful for light in one isolated stairwell. With no windows, there would be no easy vents, no way to bleed out the heat and the smoke and the poison.
“I'm telling you,” Mike said again, “that building scares me. It scares the shit out of me.”
“So hope you never get a fire in there.” Joanne patted Mike's leg when she said it. “How many pies should we get?”
Joanne used to worry about Mike, years ago, before Kate was born and he was a rookie and they lived in a rented apartment on Vincent Avenue, two miles from the Winslow Street station. They had the top floor of a triple-decker that sat on a hill overlooking a housing project and, if the wind was blowing a particular way on a hot summer night, it would gather the echo of sirens and carry them into the living room, deposit them right beside her. “Don't you die now,” she would whisper to her husband, riding around on the streets below. “Don't you dare die now.”
The fear, reflexive and unexpected, always startled her, maybe even embarrassed her. Her mother had always told her, “You don't borrow worry.” A fine piece of Irish-Catholic fatalism, but it was true and Joanne knew it. She chased away the dread almost as quickly as it came. Besides, she'd never been afraid of fire, and the sound of a siren was familiar, almost comforting. When she was a little girl, she would chase after fire trucks and police cruisers with her father, following the whooping and the wailing just because they were curious.
She'd done the same thing with Mike, too. When she met him, he was a carpenter, a shaggy college dropout swinging a hammer for nonunion wages. He'd gotten himself on the hiring list for the Worcester Fire Department, but only for practical reasons; fighting fires was a civil service job, secure, recession-proof, paid a good wage. He had no particular passion for the trade, no romantic visions of heroism or jittery cravings for danger. It was just a good job in a bad economy. He was waiting for his appointment to the training academy when Joanne saw the change in him, watched a curiosity swell up inside and ripen into an obsession, stood right next to Mike while he stared into a burning house, mesmerized, tantalized.
It happened on the Fourth of July, 1972. The firebugs all came out on Independence Day, flitting through the summer dusk, setting light to scrub brush and trash cans and the occasional house. Every year, the firemen would lurch around the city, screaming from one hot spot to the next, squirting each tangle of smoldering garbage or tinder-dry grass, stalling every so often at a recalcitrant blaze gnawing at something more substantial, like a car or a shopkeeper's goods.
Mike and Joanne went out to watch pieces of the city burn that night, cruising the streets in his gray Belvedere. At about ten-thirty that night, they stopped on Pleasant Street near the corner of Hudson, where, a few minutes earlier, someone had put a match to the front porch of a triple-decker. One of the residents tried to douse the fire with buckets of water, but the flames quickly climbed the walls, the fire rising on its own heat, finding a hold in the clapboard, then pushing itself higher.
By the time Mike and Joanne parked the car and walked closer, the third floor was engulfed in throbbing orange. The street was splattered with swirls of red and white lights from the fire trucks, and the air had a bitter, ashy sting. Mike and Joanne watched men in heavy coats and rubber boots up to the middle of their thighs spread across the lawns and the street, cranking valves on the pumper trucks, steadying ladders against the smoldering walls, a couple more bounding up the porch stairs and through the front door. Smoke swirled from a third-floor window, balls of black cotton tumbling over each other in a race up to the sky.
A hand poked through the cloud, then a head, then a full torso. A fireman leaned over the sill. A blast of flame erupted behind him, and fire shot over his head in fat, snapping tendrils. “I need a line up here,” the man shouted. “C'mon, let's go, I need another fucking line.”
Mike stood next to Joanne at the curb, transfixed. He could almost feel the heat on the back of his neck, his ears, taste the smoke in the back of his throat, scratching at his esophagus. “Goddamn,” he whispered, “that guy's got tremendous balls.” Then he felt a twitch in his gut. Adrenaline. He looked at Joanne. “I could do that,” he said.
She looked at him, turned her head away, a trace of a smile on her lips. “I know you could,” she said.
“No. Joanne, I can do that. I want to do that.”
She said it again. “I know.”
Mike answered his first alarm as a Worcester fireman six months later, clinging to the side of a 1951 Maxim Junior Aerial chugging through a sleet storm at forty miles an hour. A few months after that, almost exactly one year after he'd been hypnotized by the flames on Hudson Street, Mike watched ten people die in an inferno that swept through a flophouse on Main Street, the deadliest fire in the city's history. There were too many others to count, the tenements and factories, the triple-deckers and cheap hotels, where Mike had crawled into the smoke and the flames and walked back out. He'd never even gotten badly hurt. A few bumps and bruises, the occasional blistering burn and tufts of singed hair, and, once, a wrenched spine from the cannon stream of a wayward hose that threw him off a porch and a dozen yards through the air, onto a concrete sidewalk. He missed a few weeks after that one. But he always went back to work.
You don't borrow worry. It was true and Joanne knew it and, in time, she came to believe it.
3
DAWN WAS SILVERY GRAY, LIKE A NEW DIME, MORNING LIGHT glowing through unbroken clouds. It was December 3, 1999, a Friday, and Joe McGuirk was driving southwest toward Charlton, the twilight rising in his rearview mirror. If he hurried, he could put in five hours, maybe six, frame a stack of two-by-fours into skeletal walls, and still get home to Linda by noon.
Joe didn't build many houses. He preferred remodeling jobs, putting in new kitchens and bathrooms, self-contained projects where he could handle most of the work himself, not have to hire any labor. He was the sole proprietor of McGuirk &Son Construction, which was something of a misnomer because his
only son was just ten years old. Joe liked the name, though. He'd been calling his company that since 1989, the year he got his contractor's license and the same year Everett was born. “And Son,” Joe had reasoned, made his outfit sound bigger, older, more established. And it wasn't technically untrue.
He was a self-taught carpenter. An electrican and plumber and mechanic, too. If it could be hammered, sawed, bolted, wired, screwed, caulked, Joe could figure it out. He might get zapped eight times trying to fix a busted switch with the power connected, but he got the lights to work. Linda believed he could do anything, because she'd never seen him not be able to do something. When he was younger, he worked as a handyman at the Jewish Community Center, where he met a lot of people who wanted their peeling Victorians painted. He did that for a few years, studying at night for his contractor's license and practicing on the four-room bungalow he and Linda bought before they got married. He gutted every room, fixed it up nice, then built a second story on top. After that, he blew out the back wall, added another room, ripped out the kitchen again, put in a new one, then remodeled it a third time. With the additions, the deck, and the garage, he'd built on every inch of their property by the early nineties. So he found a new piece of land, out in the woods in Rochdale, in the wooded valleys southeast of the city, and started over. He worked for hours, absorbed in the labor, the headlights from his truck illuminating the joists and the columns he pieced together on his own. He framed the entire thing, twenty-five hundred square feet, in two weeks. (Joe did everything fast; he jogged behind the lawn-mower.) He painted the clapboards pink and bolted green shutters to the windows and moved in with Linda, Everett, and Emily, his little girl, five years earlier, right before Thanksgiving in 1994.
