3000 Degrees

by Sean Flynn

  It was nearly eleven o'clock when the procession formed around Paul's body. Mike McNamee, who had led the first five men off the deck, wasn't there. He was at home, collapsed in bed, after eight numbing days at the site. Other men from Central Street carried Paul across the deck to the ladders. As they neared the edge, Denise noticed the cork on the wall flare up, the light brighter, hotter. She watched as the men passed Paul's body down to the ground. Then she looked at the cork again, saw it flare a final time high on the wall and then go out, as quickly and quietly as it had ignited.

  21

  MIKE KICKED THE HARLEY TO LIFE, GAVE THE THROTTLE TWO quick twists, felt the engine rumble. He let the clutch out, puttered to the end of the driveway, turned into the street and accelerated, notching through the gears with his toe. Spring air rushed against his face, cool, almost chilly against his cheeks, a strong wind to blow the stray and dreary thoughts from his mind.

  He'd thought of the warehouse that morning. And the night before and the morning before that and on and on, back to the beginning. Sixteen months after Worcester Cold Storage burned, it was still the first thing on his mind when he woke up, the last thing before he went to sleep. If he jerked awake in the quiet dark of his bedroom, well after midnight but long before dawn, he thought of it then, too. Always then. The particular moments were different. Sometimes he was in the stairway and the smoke was pouring down, blinding and choking. Or maybe he saw Tom Spencer's face or heard Paul Brotherton's voice. Sometimes, it happened all over again, only all at once, the hours and minutes compressed into a single snarled memory.

  He rode north out of the city, toward the two-lane black-tops that stretched out into the countryside. The sky was a brilliant April blue and the leaves on the maples were young and pale green. He could get lost on a day like that, let the Harley decide which road to follow, leave his own mind idling in neutral for a while. It would help keep him sane.

  Mike worked on that a lot, his sanity. Not that he ever thought he was going crazy, but he knew the warehouse fire had changed him, just like it had changed every fireman in Worcester, maybe everyone in the entire city. Each of them dealt with it in his own way. Mike, he was a talker. He gave interviews to newspaper reporters and Dan Rather and spoke at fire conventions and wept with counselors, told everyone who asked the same story, every detail. What he feared the most, more than even another burning warehouse going so bad so fast, was Worcester Cold Storage sneaking up on him, the same building coming after him, rising out of the misty past, strangling him a year or ten or twenty down the line. He wanted to excise all his demons right then.

  It was interesting to watch the way different men responded to the same event. Some of them wanted another fire almost immediately, almost as if they feared losing their nerve if they had to sit around waiting, replaying the last one, remembering the minutes when they thought they might die, too. A couple didn't get a choice. Mike Coakley had inhaled so much poison and damaged his lungs so severely that one breath of the wrong toxin could kill him on the spot, only no one could be certain which chemicals would do it. “You're done,” the doctor told him. “I'm not done,” Coakley said. “I'm a fireman. I'm not leaving.” The department forced him to retire anyway.

  Some men had to get away, find new surroundings. John Sullivan, who was as brave as any man that night, as brave as any man who had ever sworn the oath, transferred off Engine 3 and into the drill school. Jay used to tease him about how those who couldn't do, taught. After December 3, it wasn't such a funny joke. Tom Dwyer, Paul Brotherton's partner on Rescue 1, transferred to the Grove Street station. Of the nineteen men who'd worked together, practically lived together, on the Group II shift at Central Street, only six would be at the station two years later.

  Then there was Joe LeBlanc. Joe was on vacation the night of the fire, but after twenty-four years on the rescue truck he was a wisened veteran, a mentor of sorts to Paul Brotherton. And they were very close, on and off the job. The day before Joe left for his vacation, three weeks before the fire, Paul had hugged him, then kissed him on the cheek. “I love you like a brother, Joe,” he'd said. “I love you like a father.” Joe heard about the fire while he was on a cruise ship floating in the Caribbean. He was bringing a souvenir home for Paul: two beads he had braided into his short, gray hair to prove he wasn't as uptight as Paul used to insist he was. He left them on Paul's casket. He went back to Rescue 1, but it wasn't the same. The only fires Joe wanted to see anymore were in his living room fireplace on a wintry day. He was counting the months until he could retire.

  Mike didn't want to retire. He might want to change a few things, though, maybe get out of the shift command, take a weekday job, something with a regular schedule. There was talk of creating a safety officer, appointing a man to analyze tactics, strategy, and equipment. Mike thought he might be good at that.

  The irony could make him shiver if he dwelled on it. Mike had always been a stickler for safety, always trying out new gear, teaching recruits how to protect themselves. Yet in the defining inferno of his career, the one that took six of his men, he wasn't sure what he could have done to protect anyone. Safety ropes would have helped, sure, but the department didn't have them, not long enough to follow Paul and Jerry all the way across the warehouse. The men finally had a few thermal imagers, paid for with donated money, charity from the kindness of strangers. But would one have helped that night? He wasn't sure. No imager could see through eighteen inches of brick.

  No one else seemed to have any answers, either. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health issued a report on the fire, but other than stating the obvious—that the department needed more and better radios—it offered nothing definitive or particularly constructive. The department had its own Board of Inquiry examine the night minute by minute. The BOI produced a magnificent document, detailed and thorough, but it assigned no blame and found no serious flaws in the attack.

  At least there were no longer any questions about how the fire had started. Once the deck had been cleared, arson investigators found evidence—a glob of red wax, the outlines of a pallet used as a mattress, the charred remains of a cat and small dog—that corroborated the statements Levesque and Barnes had given them. Less certain was what would happen to them. A judge had dismissed the manslaughter charges against both of them because there is no law against not reporting a fire in Massachusetts. The district attorney was appealing, trying to get the charges reinstated. It had just been in the paper last week. Mike wasn't sure how he felt about that. Sometimes he almost felt sorry for Barnes, retarded and pregnant and living in squalor. She was in Maine now, taken in by the same couple who'd raised her little sister since she was a toddler. They'd recognized Julie from her picture in the newspapers, raised her bail money, took her north to live. They were trying to adopt her, make it official, and eventually would. That had been in the papers, too. It got a little tiresome, though, reading about her happy new life.

  He had hoped that December 3, 2000, the first anniversary, would bring some type of closure, though he wasn't sure how such an amorphous concept would materialize. Maybe it was just a milestone that would push the demarcation of his adult life a little farther into his past, nudge it out of his present. For a full twelve months, the city had lived with The Fire. Because the events had played out in public, flickering on television screens for eight agonizing days, the public insisted on grieving with people who, before their husbands and fathers and friends were killed, had been quite private citizens. The widows were recognized in airports and restaurants and shopping malls. There were banquets and fund-raisers and plaques presented before the crowds at professional sporting events, all of which were very sincere and graciously and gratefully accepted. Yet Worcester firemen, and especially the families of the six Fallen Heroes, as they'd come to be known, were celebrity mourners. It is difficult to truly grieve when strangers are watching.

  Mike thought of Jim Lyons. Jim was fascinated by the attention. He pondered it for mon
ths, wondering why he had crates of cards and letters from all over the country, why people would stop him on the street and say they were honored to meet him. “Did you hear that, Joan?” he'd ask every time it happened. “Honored. He was honored to meet me.”

  But it wasn't so difficult to figure out. On a sweltering summer day eight months after he'd died, Jay's name, along with those of the other five Worcester firemen, was carved into a granite monument in Colorado Springs. The International Association of Fire Fighters’ Fallen Firefighter Memorial is etched with hundreds of names, men who were either killed on the job or years later by the lingering, malignant residue of soot, smoke, and heat. There is a similar monument in Emmitsburg, Maryland, and in most every town, and certainly every big city, there are granite markers and bronze plaques etched with the names of firemen who didn't survive a local fire. When a firefighter dies, he is not simply grieved; he is revered as a martyr. And if dying on the job makes a man a martyr, then simply showing up for work every day makes him a hero. There was an elegant logic to it all, a nobility that seemed to comfort him.

  Mike leaned into a curve on the outskirts of Paxton, a bucolic little town just over the city line, then straightened onto the ribbon of road stretched out before him. The Harley felt good, handled well. A good-looking bike, too, a 1995 Heritage Softail, black on charcoal. It used to belong to Jay Lyons, was his prize possession, until one day in the spring of 2000 when Jim Lyons wheeled it across the street and gave it to Mike. He said he thought Jay would have wanted him to have it. Mike fought back tears as he accepted. He thought, They don't blame me.

  No one blamed Mike. A lot of people, all of his men, actually considered him a hero. He stood at the foot of a staircase that led into a cauldron of black poison, facing men blinded by desperation and determination, and said, “No more.” If he'd let them, every man there would have gone back up. Some of them, maybe most of them, wouldn't have come back down. He had the courage to admit defeat, and to men who had never lost before.

  Mike knew from the beginning that it hadn't been his fault. Yet he didn't believe it, not in his guts where it mattered. Even now, roaring past new-budding fields sixteen months later, he could have a flash of doubt, start to dissect the night, replay each frame, search again for anything he could have done differently, should have done differently. He never found anything, though, and he looked less and less with each passing week.

  He opened the throttle, let the staccato pop of the engine bounce around inside his helmet. Then something caught his eye in the western sky. A black column, twisting against the blue like knotted strands of yarn. He watched it for miles, all the way into North Brookfield, the smoke beginning to mushroom, flatten out and spread. Small orange slashes appeared just above the horizon, tendrils of fire snapping upward.

  It was closer now, perhaps five miles away. From behind, over the growl of his bike, he heard the wail of sirens. He glanced in the mirror: two tanker trucks, loaded with water, lights flashing, barreled up the road. He steered to the side, gave them a wide berth, but maintained his speed. He couldn't see what was burning, but it had to be huge; a black cloud loomed above like a thunderhead. Mike kept riding toward it, by habit or perhaps even instinct, the proverbial moth to the literal flames.

  He crossed the line into Hardwick. An old mill had caught fire, a spectacular blaze, at least four alarms on its way to five. A shot of adrenaline hit his bloodstream. He twisted the throttle harder.

  Then he stopped. He backed off the accelerator, pulled to the side of the road, cut the engine. The fire was only a half mile away. He could smell it, almost taste the smoke. He looked behind him, blue sky over green buds, an asphalt ribbon laced between them. He looked forward. Black and orange. He kicked the engine over, revved it, shook his head and laughed at himself. “What are you doing?” he said out loud. “It's a beautiful day. And you've seen enough of this shit.”

  He let out the clutch and steered into a looping turn toward home.