by Sean Flynn
Mary would flash a knowing smile. “You slept all night, didn't you?”
Tim would nod. It didn't matter if he'd waged a six-hour firefight or drank coffee in front of the TV. “Yeah,” he would tell her. “It was pretty quiet.”
Mary played back the messages on her answering machine, then turned on the television. The warehouse fire was on all the newscasts, reporters announcing six men were missing and that all the families had been notified and that most of them were gathering at St. Stephen's. She was horrified and relieved at the same time; a terrible tragedy, yes, but no one had notified her. Tim must be all right.
She called Grove Street. No one would tell her anything, only that there was a fire, that Tim had been part of the team fighting it.
“Okay,” she said. “Well, tell him I called, and have him call me on my cell phone.”
She grabbed her phone and her keys and got back in her car, figuring she could find out more at St. Stephen's, maybe offer some comfort. She pulled onto Mendon Street, turned the wheel toward Worcester, pressed down on the accelerator. Her cell phone chirped before she crossed the border out of Hopedale.
It was Randy Chavoor. “Mary, where are you?”
“I'm driving in,” she said. “I'm on my way to St. Stephen's.”
“Go home. Please, turn around and go home,” Randy said. “We'll come and get you.”
She gripped the wheel harder with the one hand that was on it. Why do they have to come and get me? Why can't I drive in? She took her foot off the gas, slowed the car. “What's wrong?” she said, her voice cracking.
“Mary, just go home. We'll be there in a few minutes.”
“What's wrong?”
“Mary. Please. Go home.”
She turned around, drove back along Mendon Street, turned into the access road to the Hopedale Village Cemetery, which led to her driveway. Her pulse was racing, and her hands trembled as she opened the door. She was inside for only a couple minutes when the phone rang. Her daughter, Diane, was calling from her home in Pennsylvania.
“Is Tim working?” she asked. Word of the fire was spreading across the country, by word of mouth—Diane's sister-in-law had called her husband from Worcester—and now by microwaves and satellite uplinks.
“Yes,” Mary said.
“Is he all right?”
“I … I don't know,” Mary said.
Diane could hear the fear in her mother's voice. She absorbed it, started to panic. She was an adult when Tim and Mary met, already married and the mother of a newborn son, but over the past fourteen years she'd come to consider Tim as more of a father than Mary's first husband, who'd moved out when she was a teenager. To her children—she'd given birth to a daughter in 1990—he was Papa Tim, the grandfather who came to dance recitals and built birdhouses and ran through the sprinkler on the lawn on hot summer days and played Santa Claus for Amanda's Brownie troop. Tim always reminded Diane of Santa, the same ruddy cheeks and twinkling eyes, only not as fat. Maybe he would dress up again this year when he came to visit for Christmas. He'd put in for the vacation days, but hadn't told Mary yet. It was going to be a surprise, spending the holiday with Diane and the grandkids.
Mary could hear heavy footsteps outside. Randy Chavoor was at the door. Mary could see it in his face, his eyes moist and sad. She was being notified, just like they said on television. She dropped the phone. Diane heard it hit the floor.
After he watched Patrick Spencer ride off in a police cruiser, Mike McNamee went to St. Stephen's. He had to pay his respects to the families and the other men, offer whatever token of comfort that he could muster. He knew there was nothing he could say, but he had to show up. It had been his fire, his operation, his men. He belonged with them.
The room at the church was crowded with off-duty firemen and their wives, all of them clustering around the families of the missing men, Kathy, Michelle, Linda, Mary, and Jim and Joan Lyons. The mayor was there, as well as the city manager, and Chief Dennis Budd had just finished explaining how awful the night had been. In a weary voice, he told them, “We hold very little hope.”
Mike walked through the door just as Budd was finishing. He scanned the room. He spotted Denise Brotherton, sitting in a chair by herself, her skin pale and ashen against her wrinkled blue scrubs.
He went to her, got down on his knees, a supplicant, took both her hands in his. He didn't say anything, just let Denise stare down at him for a moment.
She spoke first. “Mike, Paul always comes home,” she said. “Tell me he's coming home tomorrow.”
Mike blinked, instinctively holding back tears. He realized his eyes were dry, that he didn't have any emotions left in reserve. “Denise,” he said, “I'm sorry. I can't tell you that.”
Denise held his gaze. She seemed to be pleading with her eyes, but her voice was composed. “Mike, I have six sons,” she said. “Please tell me he's coming home. Please.”
Mike squeezed her hands, looked away, then back again. “I can't, Denise,” he said. “I'm sorry, but I can't.”
18
THE DELUGE CONTINUED INTO THE NIGHT, GREAT FOUNTAINS OF water arcing from the nozzles on the aerial scopes and ladder trucks and showering down on Worcester Cold Storage. The flames were aggressive, belligerent, as if they'd been emboldened by having forced mortal men to flee for their lives. They feasted on the innards of the warehouse, chewed through the massive timbers and joists that held each floor in place, melted the cork and polystyrene, consumed the partition walls and scraps of trash. Once the fire had pierced the roof, burned wide and ragged holes through the tar and the asphalt, it was able to inhale more oxygen, blow it back out bright and hot.
Mike stood on the street at midnight, after he'd told Joan Lyons her boy was missing and Patrick Spencer his dad was lost and Denise Brotherton he was sorry. He watched the fire rage through smudgy spectacles. A black rain mizzled from the sky, droplets of ash that had risen on clouds of steam and liquefied particles of insulation and roofing, all of it mixing into a charcoal mist that speckled Mike's coat, his helmet, his eyeglasses.
He didn't have to be there. Most of his men, the guys who had fought the initial stages of the battle, had been pulled out, relieved by fresh troops and sent back to their stations to rest and grieve. Counselors were waiting for them, fellow firefighters and psychologists who specialized in disaster, to talk to anyone who wanted or needed their help. Mike didn't want to talk to anyone, not then. There was nothing he wanted to say, nothing he wanted to hear. What could anyone tell him anyway? That it wasn't his fault? That six men—good men, his men— choked to death because they had lousy luck or because God was in a particularly vengeful mood that evening or because, the worst thing of all, sometimes bad shit just happened? That he hadn't made a mistake, that there was nothing else he could have done, no decision he should have made sooner or later or differently? That it just wasn't his fucking fault? Would anyone say that? Would it matter? And would he believe it?
Mike wiped his glasses, smeared the soot, put them back on the bridge of his nose. He glowered at the warehouse. The Building from Hell, he thought, as if it were the demonic villain in a low-budget thriller. “You've got them in there,” he muttered, talking under his breath, cursing the building as if it were alive. “You've got six guys in there.”
The night rumbled, a concussion pulsing through the warehouse. Embers and sparks exploded into the sky, cascaded over the walls, fell to the street like fireworks, and the flames leapt higher, glowed more brightly. Mike guessed that one of the floors had collapsed, the impact throwing the cinders into the air, the rush of fresh air fanning the fire like a giant, clumsy bellows. He was fifty yards from the building, across Franklin Street in a parking lot where Car 3, his Expedition, had been stationed as a makeshift command post, yet he could feel the heat, a gust of warm wind that drove the temperature into the eighties.
Mike watched the men arrayed around the building. He saw firefighters from Paxton, Millbury, and Boston, men in blue windbreakers with “ATF”�
�for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—stenciled in yellow on the back. The night strobed with red, white, and blue, the lights from fire trucks and, farther out, police cars blocking the nearby streets, diverting traffic from the area. A mile or so to the west, out of view, state police troopers parked their gray and blue Crown Victorias across the eastbound lanes of Interstate 290, blocking traffic. In the lot opposite the warehouse was a van from the state medical examiner's office in Boston. Mike knew there would be six body bags inside.
He replayed the night in his head. It came back to him in shards of memory, each clear and precise, but out of sequence, disjointed. The view from the highway, pale smoke drifting lazily from the roof. Flames swirling toward the elevator shaft. Three identical doors on the third floor. The plunge into darkness. Sully in front of him. I can't find Jay and Joe. Calling in the second alarm, being cautious, gathering reinforcements before he needed them. Paul Brotherton on the radio. Mayday, mayday! The shriek over the phone when he told Kathy Lyons her brother was missing. Jimmy Pijus behind him. We couldn't make the third floor. All those men in front of him, angry, bewildered, horrified, screaming. They're still up there, goddamnit!
He held that moment in sharp focus, examined it, dissected it. He'd been lucid, he was sure of that. It occurred to him that he hadn't been scared, that he'd been almost calm. The most awful decision he had ever been forced to make—one fogged by loyalty and responsibility and honor and tradition and unimaginable distress—had been wholly pragmatic. He remembered his words, the blunt declaration. We've already lost six. We're not going to lose any more.
Another concussion shook the warehouse. More sparks raced up to the sky, soaring two hundred feet above the streets, and the flames leaped again. A second floor had collapsed. Mike looked toward the warehouse, felt the hot wind blow into his face, watched the water spray into the fire, then rise out as steam.
No man could survive that, he thought, not inside, crawling blind, trying to feel his way out. If he'd sent anyone else in, if he'd let even one of those men push past him, charge into the boiling black, he'd be dead. He had been right to call it off, order everyone out. He was sure of it.
Paul Brotherton was not dead. He was only missing. If the building was as complicated as it had been described to her, a maze of storage rooms and walk-in freezers, Denise reasoned, then Paul could have found refuge behind a thick wall, or squirmed into an air pocket in the debris. People, ordinary people who weren't as skilled or as brave or as resourceful as a fireman on Worcester's Rescue 1, had survived beneath the rubble of an earthquake for days, a week, sometimes longer. Yes, she told herself, Paul was missing but he was alive and he would be when the other firemen, his brothers, dug him out in the morning.
Paul was dead. Denise was sure of it now. He'd run out of air in the belly of an inferno, and when a man could breathe only searing poison, he dies. It was an immutable law of physiology. She had been a nurse long enough to know how it had happened, too. His death had been relatively painless, or it should have been. The smoke would have scorched his throat, but it would have only hurt for a minute, until the carbon monoxide polluted his bloodstream, addled his brain, rendered him mercifully unconscious.
But she could be wrong. She thought of the earthquake survivors again, limp and dusty, rescuers lifting them from a mountain of shattered concrete. Their wives had believed those men were dead, and they'd been wrong. Denise could be wrong. Until they pulled a dead man from the ruins of Worcester Cold Storage, she could hope she was wrong. Her six sons, Paul's six sons, could hope, too.
Three of the boys were awake when she got home. It was one-thirty in the morning and there were people in the house, friends and relatives, all talking nervously, some of them crying. The boys asked their mother what was going on.
“There's a really bad fire, guys,” she said. “And …” And what? Daddy's dead? Daddy's missing? Daddy's trapped under smoldering bricks waiting to be dug out? She didn't know, which is what she told them. “It's a really bad one. I don't know if Daddy's going to be able to beat this one.”
Mike, the oldest, didn't say a word, just turned and walked away. Brian threw up. Timothy, nine years old, the fourth son, simply wept.
The warehouse was still burning at dawn, heaving lead-gray smoke up against the morning's flat silver sky. The worst had passed, the towering flames finally beaten back, the fuel inside depleted and soggy. But the fire was stubborn, refusing to completely surrender.
No one had been able to get back inside since Randy Chavoor had crawled out just after eight o'clock the night before. The ferocious heat and smoke that had forced the men to retreat had done tremendous damage to the interior, burning away the supports, weakening the entire structure. After almost a century of squatting on the edge of downtown like a square-edged mountain, sturdy and solid, Worcester Cold Storage was now a fragile shell.
Firemen knew that the danger did not end when the flames had been extinguished. Floors weakened, walls buckled, roofs sagged. Charred ruins were inherently treacherous, unstable jumbles that could crush a man as surely as fire could burn him and smoke could choke him. The deadliest firefighting disaster in New England, in fact, had happened after the flames went out. On June 17, 1972, Boston firemen spent three hours snuffing a four-alarm fire at the old Hotel Vendome. They were prowling the wreckage afterward when part of the building collapsed, crushing nine men to death.
The Worcester chiefs weren't taking any more chances with the warehouse, wouldn't give it an opportunity to kill anyone else. A crane was ordered to the scene to begin dismantling the exterior walls, knock at least one of them down, split the building open so they could see what they were up against.
The crane was positioned on Arctic Street, near the stairwell where Mike had sent men up to search for Paul and Jerry. It was a huge machine, a long steel spire dangling a thick cable, on the end of which was a 4,500-pound wrecking ball. Mike stood off to one side, far enough away from the building that he wouldn't be caught in an avalanche of bricks and mortar. The crane operator hauled the ball into the air, raised it almost to the top of the wall. He shifted his levers, swung the ball away, then back toward the warehouse.
Mike heard a dull thud, felt a vibration beneath his feet. But the wall held. A puff of mortar dust marked where the ball had struck, but no bricks fell.
He turned to look at the man running the crane. The operator opened his eyes wide, exaggerated surprise, then shook his head. The building was tougher than it appeared. It seemed malevolent, deliberately frustrating the puny men who challenged it. Most of Group II, the shift that had been on duty when the warehouse began to burn, had returned to the scene. Hundreds of other firemen—from Worcester, Boston, and a dozen other cities and towns—were there, too, all of them desperate to get inside, to start searching. Like Denise and the other wives, they held on to a slim hope that someone had survived. Even if all six were dead—which every man knew in his gut was the truth—they needed to recover the bodies, retrieve them from the ashes. Firemen never left a brother behind.
The wrecking ball swung again. Another thud, but no noticeable damage. On the third strike, a handful of chips snapped off the brick facing and fluttered to the ground. Mike kicked the pavement with the toe of his boot in frustration.
As the day wore on, the big ball taking small chunks from the B wall, the rest of the men were growing restless, tense and edgy. They milled around the staging area in the parking lot across Franklin Street, next to a blue tent that had been set up to shelter the families of the missing six. Emotions were raw. Men bickered, sniped at each other. A rumor circulated that firefighters from out of town would be sent into the building first, that Worcester men wouldn't be able to bring out their own. More loud voices, angry shouting.
Mike set up a stepladder, climbed to the third rung so he could see the entire crowd, holler down on them. “Hey,” he barked. The men quieted. “Now listen to me. We've never been through something like this before….”
Grumbling from the men, their voices rising again.
“Hey! Listen. We're going to get through this. But now is not the time to be fighting. We're all doing the best we can here.”
He scanned their tired faces. Hardly any of them had slept for more than an hour, and most not even that long. They were still caked in sweat and cinders. Some of them had feared for their lives only hours before, had been certain they were going to die, right there, right then. And they wanted to go back in. Mike understood how they felt. He wanted to get inside.
By late afternoon, the wrecking ball had hammered a rough V shape through the B wall, making it seem as if the bricks were being slowly unzipped. From Arctic Street, Mike and the rest of the men got their first clear view of the inside. The floors had indeed collapsed, pancaking one on top of the other. The second floor had apparently held, though it was hard to be certain from that angle. The rubble from the upper floors was piled more than twenty feet deep. Finding the bottom would take days of digging.
The men could also see the fire wall, opposite of and parallel to the side the crane was dismantling. From the doorways cut into it and the holes that had once held the charred stubs of floor joists, they could count exactly how many levels the warehouse had contained. Six, which meant Paul and Jerry had been lost on the fifth floor, two down from the roof. At least they'd looked in the right place.
A team of searchers ventured onto the pile shortly before dusk. They did only a surface scan at first, carefully picking their way through the smoldering debris, looking for any sign of movement, any trace of the missing six. Spot fires flared, and flames still crackled from behind the firewall.
Mike was exhausted, but he remained on his feet, patrolling the grounds, picking through the ruins. He wondered if he might be in shock, if the enormity of the fire, of the loss, had overloaded his emotions. He hadn't shed a tear or thrashed in a rage. Six men down. It didn't seem real. He was too close to it, surrounded by it. From his position on Franklin Street, he couldn't see the grief rippling outward, through the city, across the state, into the wider world.
