3000 Degrees

by Sean Flynn

  11

  AMILE AND HALF FROM THE BURNING WAREHOUSE, IN THE Grove Street station, Lt. John Sullivan kept his attention on the radio, monitoring the progress of the attack through the static-fractured chatter. He wasn't terribly concerned. All the voices were calm, controlled, no edge of concern in anyone's tone or phrasing. It sounded like a messy fire, an unpredictable rogue. But it was under control. Other than the single dead hydrant that had forced McNamee to reposition trucks, the battle was going as smoothly as any such firefight could.

  Lt. Tom Spencer crossed the apparatus floor at about six-thirty Three men from Grove Street, all on Engine 16, had rolled out the door thirteen minutes earlier when the second alarm had been struck, and he noticed some of the other guys were getting antsy. He saw Sullivan, the lieutenant on Engine 3, fiddling with his gear next to the passenger side of the truck. Sully stepped through one leg of his pants and into one boot, then the other, pulled the suspenders up, dipped a shoulder through one loop.

  “What are you doing?” Tom asked. He said it with a teasing sneer.

  “Just getting ready,” Sullivan said. Sully knew. He'd already told Jay Lyons: Three alarms. I can smell it. “Always gotta be ready, you know.”

  Tommy let out a good-natured laugh, shook his head as Sully snapped the suspenders over his other shoulder. He liked Sully, mostly because he knew him outside of the station—their teenage daughters were best friends, and one of them was always driving his girl to the other one's house. One on one, away from the job, Sully was a good guy. He had his problems in the station, though. They held the same rank, and had for six years. Tom always hoped Sully would learn from watching him, figure out how to lead his men without pushing them, exert his authority by example rather than bluster. Maybe it was the age difference, Sully's youth getting in the way. Tom had been on the job almost twice as long, since 1979, had worked his way up slowly. When Sully made lieutenant in 1983, he was the youngest officer in the department, only six years behind him. Some of the guys thought he overcompensated, barked out orders so no one would forget the young guy was in charge.

  If a third alarm was struck, Tom was ready. He felt his medallion againt his chest. It was a silver icon of St. Florian, the patron saint of firefighters. Now there was a saint a man could get behind. Florian was a Roman soldier and a closet Christian in the second century who, according to legend, once saved an entire town from burning by throwing a single bucket of water on the flames. But he fell out of favor with the emperor because he refused to slaughter his fellow Christians or renounce his faith. He was whipped, flayed alive, and set on a pile of kindling to be burned to death. “If you burn me,” he told his executioners, “I will climb to heaven on the flames.” So the soldiers tied a rock around his neck and threw him in a river instead.

  Tom's grandmother had given him the medal on his first day as a fireman, and he'd worn it every day since. At the beginning of each shift, he'd take it from his locker and drop it over his head, then button a collared uniform shirt over it. He never wore the department-issued T-shirt. Too casual for an officer. Then he would pin his badge, number seventy-nine, to his breast pocket, where he always kept a pen and a small, spiral-bound notebook. That was one of the obvious differences: Tom looked like an officer because that's what he happened to be; Sully pinned his silver bars to his knit winter cap because that's what he wanted people to see. It rubbed a lot of guys the wrong way, like he was flaunting his smarts, reminding everyone that he tested higher than they did.

  No matter. Tom had a soft spot for everybody. “The true sign of class,” he used to tell his kids, “is the man who treats the homeless person and the president the same way.” Or the young lieutenant the same as the chief.

  He smiled at Sully. “Well, as long as you're ready,” he said. “But don't get too excited.”

  He walked away chuckling. He was a little melancholy, expecting this was his last night on Ladder 2, but he was still in a jovial mood. After lunch with Kathy, he'd spent the afternoon mapping her walking tour through midtown Manhattan. It reminded him of all the places he liked in New York, how much he liked the city. And his regular crew was there for his final tour on the ladder. Good firemen, all three of them, veterans with six decades of experience between them. He'd miss working with them, but he wasn't going far; the Fire Prevention office was in the same building as the Grove Street station, which meant he'd see all the guys when they worked day tours.

  To look at the men of Ladder 2, though, Tom appeared out of place, like the runt of the Ladder 2 litter. Paul Brosnihan, Paul Grazulis, and Tim Jackson were all giant men, beefy with the vaguely surly look of longshoremen, each at least six feet tall, towering over their lieutenant, the Lilliputian. He remembered his wife, Kathy, had been afraid of Tim Jackson the first time she met him, which was reasonable because Tim could be a scary-looking guy. He had sandy hair giving way to gray, a mustache that arched down past the corners of his mouth to his jaw, and arms that could bench two-fifty without breaking a sweat, three hundred if he grunted. There was a tattoo of the Harley-Davidson logo on one bicep and the insignia of the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles, on the other. Tim had signed on to fight with them in Vietnam, damn near died with them, too, saw three of his buddies turn to crimson mist before his eyes, his own body blown backward by the concussion of a mortar shell, floating through the air, slow motion, his mind repeating over and over, I'm not dead, I'm not dead, holy fuck, I'm not dead. He still carried shrapnel in one arm and one leg.

  Tim was the other reason Tom was in a good mood, the reason he was smiling to himself every so often. The lieutenant was planning a joke, had already gathered the supplies and planned the operation. Tom Spencer might not have been the funniest man in the station, perhaps not the quickest with the verbal jab or the sophomoric put-down. But he was the most elaborate, orchestrating pranks that required hours, sometimes days, of setup and delivery. At the moment, he had several dozen clear white Christmas bulbs, the ones the size of a man's thumb, stacked in his basement. One night the following week, when he knew Tim would be working, Tom planned on driving to Hopedale, a tiny and semirural bedroom community south of Worcester, where Tim lived in a pale yellow bungalow with his wife, Mary. On the front lawn was a blue spruce strung with blue lights rigged to a timer so they would automatically light at dusk. Tom was going to unscrew every blue bulb and replace it with a white one.

  Tom thought that would be very funny. He wouldn't even have to see Tim's face when the tree lit up white; just imagining it was good enough. Kathy, on the other hand, suspected that this was an inordinate amount of effort for a prank. “Oh, no,” Tom had told her. “Just to know Timmy, to know how much he loves that tree. When he gives us directions, it's a landmark. ‘When you see the blue lights on the tree, that's it.'” Then he laughed. Tonight, seeing Tim in the station, he tried to keep a straight face. It wasn't easy.

  The spruce on Tim Jackson's front lawn was almost fifteen feet tall now, and almost as wide, a robust evergreen, round and fat and full. A second one stood next to it, farther back from the road, the two of them rising like a bushy, bluish screen to block out the traffic on Mendon Street.

  He'd planted both of them himself. The larger one, the older one, was a sapling he'd brought home at Christmastime eleven years earlier, in 1988, the first Christmas after he married Mary. They decorated it with tiny ornaments and put it on the sun porch. Then, when the weather warmed, Tim scooped a hole from the half-thawed ground, nestled it into the soil so the roots could take hold and the branches could push up into the Hopedale sky. He called it God's Country, his patch of green on the edge of the village cemetery, and it seemed an appropriate thing to say because Tim Jackson finally felt blessed.

  He was almost forty years old when he found Mary. He had left two wives in the past, along with a whole other life, a different, darker image of himself. He grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, which was the south side of the Boston and Albany line, in a dense neighborhood of wood-fra
med tenements stacked on steep hills and bordered on one side by Worcester Cold Storage and the rest of the stinking warehouses and on another by the county jail and the Worcester Asylum for the Hopelessly Insane. Every inch of it was eventually demolished, perhaps mercifully, to make room for the interstate and a housing project. His aunt and uncle raised him because his parents, an exceptionally fertile couple that drifted between Worcester and Providence, couldn't cope with all seventeen of their children. He wasn't an unhappy child, but he always wondered why his mother never came back for him.

  He got his sweetheart pregnant about the same time he was finishing high school, married her, and then left her to go fight the Communists in Vietnam. He was a good soldier, earned his Purple Heart and his Bronze Star and a couple of other medals before limping back to Worcester in 1971. He never returned to his family life, though. Mostly, he found companionship in a bottle. He wasn't much of a husband, leaving for weeks at a time, stopping by to see his son every so often, nursing a cup of tea, waiting to leave. That marriage officially ended in early 1973, but it had essentially been over for almost six years. The second time around wasn't much better. He married a British expat named Lesley in 1976, fathered another son, then limped along for eight years before that union fell apart as well.

  Tim was a good fireman, though, a great one, even. He had joined the department in 1972, sat through the same drill class as Mike McNamee, and quickly developed a reputation for fearlessness, as if he needed to taunt the flames, stare them down, prove he was tougher than fire. He had to be ordered out of a building more than once, sprinting, diving clear with orange tentacles lunging after his boots. He worked Rescue 1 for years, approached the job with a soldier's code: never leave a man behind. And he thrived on the action. “After Vietnam,” he told his second wife, “where else could I find that kind of excitement?” Sometimes Lesley would confess that she was afraid for him, afraid she'd be left a widow. “Don't be afraid, honey,” Tim would tell her. He always smiled when he said that, like he was secretly remembering the punch line to one of his long, opaque jokes. “Yes, every alarm could be the last alarm. But don't worry about it. If it is, they'll have one of those big funerals for me. Everyone'll come. It'll be great.”

  The booze proved to be more dangerous than the flames, almost cost him his career. Tim was never a fall-down drunk. Nasty sometimes, and occasionally belligerent, but always functional. But the brass didn't like smelling beer on his breath, didn't think it was a good idea for a man to be climbing on burning roofs and crawling through smoke-black rooms if his head wasn't completely clear. They warned him once, then twice. Tim decided he liked being a fireman more than he liked liquor.

  That was 1984, after his second divorce. He met Mary Flynn the following year, watched her come through the door of a nightclub called the Driftwood, hips gently swaying under a too-tight white dress. He fell in love right then. She barely noticed him. She flirted with Tim's buddy Gary, asked him to dance during a ladies-choice number, took his business card when Gary asked for her number, disappeared out the door.

  Tim saw her a week or so later, at a Halloween party. He had a rubber mask pulled over his head, a wrinkly latex face with a fringe of matted gray hair around the bald crown. A bolo tie was knotted around his neck, and he kept an overcoat pulled around his waist, flashing it open every so often to reveal fake pant legs held up with elastic around his knees and a pair of boxer shorts stuffed with a plastic baby rattle. A dirty old man. He waved at Mary across the floor, danced with her once or twice, and followed her outside when the party broke up.

  “You don't remember me, do you?” he said.

  Mary laughed. “No. How could I? I can't see your face.”

  “I'll take my mask off if you'll give me a kiss,” Tim said.

  Mary laughed again. She blushed.

  “Really. I'll take it off if you'll give me a kiss.”

  Mary looked at him for a moment, considering, coy. “Okay,” she said. “Take your mask off.”

  Tim tugged at the edge of the latex, lifted it up, peeled the old man away from his young man's face. He smiled, his mustache following the rise of his mouth.

  Mary studied his features. He was familiar, but she couldn't quite place him.

  “You don't remember me, do you? Because I remember you.”

  “Yes, of course I do …” She looked more closely, quiet, stalling for time. Then it came to her. “The Driftwood,” she said, half triumphant, half relieved. “You were at the Driftwood that night.”

  “Yes!”

  Mary examined him now, an exaggerated appraisal. “Yeah,” she said slowly, “you're not too bad.”

  She kissed him on the cheek to hold up her end of the deal. Tim asked for her number, and she demurred again. But she offered to take his.

  Then she made him wait. Two weeks after Halloween, she finally dialed his number. “Wow,” Tim said when he heard her voice. “I'd just about given up on you.”

  A few days before Thanksgiving, he bought her dinner in the restaurant of the Sheraton Hotel in Milford, a small town southeast of Worcester. He was charming and considerate, a downright gentleman. Mary wasn't sure exactly what she was looking for in a man, but she'd been divorced long enough to have figured out what she didn't want. No cads, drunks, or playboys. Tim wasn't any of those things. In fact, one of the first things she noticed was how honest he was. On their fourth date, he told her about his years of drinking and his months of sobriety, the kind of red flag most men would be too wary to hoist. But as the months wore on, through the fifth date and the tenth and the fiftieth, the pieces fell into place. Tim was a walking twelve-step program. He wasn't preachy or pious about it, but humbled and introspective and serenely uncritical. He knew where the bottom was, knew anyone could plummet, dropping straight down and landing hard. “There but for the grace of God,” he used to say whenever the conversation turned to a wino or a hobo or some other troubled soul. “There but for the grace of God go I.”

  For all that, they had a playful romance. Tim took Mary along on his second job, driving a charter bus—if a man can drive a fire truck, he can drive a bus—full of tourists to see the seaside mansions in Newport and the kaleidoscope hills of autumn leaves. In the warmer months, Tim would kick his motorcycle, a Triumph and, later, a Harley-Davidson, into gear, tell Mary to hold on tight behind him, and roar down a country two-lane, north into Vermont and New Hampshire and south to Connecticut, all across New England. When they came upon a roadside shop that sold country crafts or primitive gewgaws, Mary would flap her arms against his sides so Tim would know to pull over, which he always did. In the spring, they would ride all the way to Washington, D.C., for a motorcycle rally called Rolling Thunder, a horde of military veterans rumbling into the capital in honor of their comrades who went missing in action and the prisoners of war who never came home. Tim would ride straight to the Vietnam veterans memorial to pay his respects. He took a picture once of a panel into which had been etched with three soldiers named Jackson, all killed in the jungle. There, too, but for the grace of God.

  Mary knew fairly early that she would marry Tim. But two bad marriages will make a man skittish. Tim was deliberate, cautious, drawing out the courtship until he was certain he'd sorted love from lust. And Mary was patient. More than two years after their first date, on St. Patrick's Day 1988, he asked her to be his wife.

  “Let's just do it,” he said. “No fanfare, nothing fancy. We've both had all that. Let's just do it.”

  Two weeks later, on Easter Sunday, they were married by a justice of the peace. They spent that night at a small inn in New Hampshire, stayed for a few honeymoon days, then moved into Mary's pale yellow Cape in Hopedale.

  It was the first real house Tim had ever lived in, a home that wasn't stacked into a triple-decker or carved out of an old Victorian. He dug up the yard, planted Korean lilacs and white hydrangeas and climbing yellow roses and pink azaleas. He built a deck under a pergola outside the kitchen with a view of the cem
etery and grafted an addition onto the side, next to the dining room, with a planked ceiling and a fieldstone fireplace and a wide window where he could sit in his armchair and watch his blue spruces grow. He kept his magazines and books in neat piles on either side of his chair, Hog Tales and Cruising Rider in a wicker basket to the left, Essential Shrubs and Family Circle's gardening supplement on a small table to the right.

  Winter was the worst time of year for Tim. He couldn't ride his bike, for one. And except for the evergreens, the yard was barren, nothing more than brittle sticks poking up through the muddy snow. He would count the weeks until spring, wait for the sun to warm the soil, for the buds of the hydrangeas to curl from the stalks. On the first fine day, he and Mary would sit on the deck, and Tim would draw in a deep breath, smell the greening on the breeze. “Well,” he'd say, “we made it through another one.” And Mary would smile at him and nod her head and they would raise their coffee cups to all that was blooming around them.

  Lieutenant Sullivan stayed close to Engine 3, his attention focused on the radio. He heard the alert tones, shrill beeps cutting through the background noise, the roar of the fire and the splash of water and the muffled voices of men yelling to each other. He checked the time: 6:39. Then a dispatcher's voice, repeating Mike McNamee's order: “All companies working inside the structure, use extreme caution. There may be holes in the floor, building may be extremely unsafe. Once again, all companies in the interior use—”