Pyro

by Earl Emerson

  “I think he’s talking to you,” Rideout said.

  “Fire it up.”

  “I think he’s talking to you.”

  I looked down at the sidewalk, knowing Hertlein wouldn’t understand a word I said over the noise of the fan. She fired it up and I said, “He’s a fuckin’ idiot.” Hertlein yelled something long and complicated, but neither of us could hear a word over the fan, which sounded like an airplane motor. Rideout placed the fan an appropriate distance from the doorway and reattached her supply hose to her face piece.

  According to common SFD practice, we should have first ensured an exit for the smoke before firing it up, yet there was an easier—though frowned upon—method. Fire up the fan and watch the smoke. An experienced firefighter could tell within seconds if there was an outlet for the smoke elsewhere in the building. If there was no exit, the building didn’t clear. But it was clearing. So there was an open door or window elsewhere in the structure.

  Hertlein was headed up the concrete steps with surprising agility for a three-hundred-pound man when I grabbed Rideout and pulled her inside. We found a carpeted stairway and took it up into the grayness. The second floor was huge: three, maybe four bedrooms, two baths, a room that appeared to be a sewing or wardrobe room, a guest suite, all of it empty. There was more smoke up here, but it was moving around now because of the fan. I could see the dim light from a Tiffany lamp in the hallway.

  The third floor was smokier, which probably meant our open window was on the second floor.

  In a bedroom on three we found an enormous canopied bed with a body in it. Under the glow from my battle lantern we saw a raven-haired woman, nude, a wineglass next to several pill bottles on the night table.

  “Ma’am,” I said, shaking her gently. “Wake up. Ma’am.” She didn’t wake up, not then and not when I shook her more forcefully. There was no telling how long she’d been in this smoke.

  “Chair carry?” Rideout asked.

  “No. I’ve got her. Just walk in front and make sure I don’t trip.”

  “I can help.”

  “I have her.”

  I pulled a sheet off the bed and wrapped her, then scooped her into my arms. Maybe it was because I could no longer direct the beam of the battle lantern, but I had trouble finding my way out of the room. It seemed smokier than it had a minute earlier. Rideout was confused too and opened a closet door thinking it led to the corridor.

  The woman was limp and fragile in my arms. I had her under the knees and armpits, carrying her in front of me like a baby. Her heavy head lolled against my shoulder. To her credit, Rideout spoke over her portable radio, “King Command. This is Ladder Three. We’re bringing a victim out of the house on the east corner. We’ll need a medic unit.”

  “Ladder Three? Did you say you had a victim?” It was Chief Johnson.

  “That’s affirmative,” Rideout answered.

  The smoke was thicker in the corridor as we felt our way down the stairs. Somewhere on the second floor the victim awoke briefly and launched into a coughing fit, then just as quickly lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  8. TIG OLD BITTIES

  We got turned around on the second floor. It didn’t take long to get straightened out, but the woman in my arms didn’t need any more smoke. I’d been hoping to be out of the house in sixty seconds, but a minute had passed and we were still goofing around on the second floor where the smoke was even denser than it had been on our way up. The smoke and gases had thickened and we were blind now, working from memory.

  At last, with great caution, we found and descended the final flight of stairs, Rideout in front, her hand on the victim, guiding me step by step.

  Halfway down the staircase I realized why our visibility had decreased. The fan was no longer running. To make matters worse, the front door had closed on us. By this time the woman was beginning to sag in my arms. We wore close to fifty pounds of gear. This woman weighed 130, easy, so here I was carrying 180 pounds at three in the morning.

  When we finally got the door open and stepped out past the dead fan on the porch, it was raining. Huddled under the hoods of their foul-weather jackets, two fire department paramedics waited in the street with a gurney. They had a yellow disposable blanket over the gurney to keep the bedding dry. A civilian with a news camera hustled toward us from Jackson Street. Zeke Boles stood at the bottom of the steps in full turnout gear, looking disheveled and confused.

  The blanket had slipped off our patient’s shoulders so that her torso was bare from the navel up. Rideout flipped the blanket back over her. I recognized this woman, but I couldn’t quite think of where I knew her from.

  Judging by the wrinkled flesh of her arms and lower neck, she was in her late seventies or early eighties, though her breasts looked as if they belonged on a porno queen. Her lips had been pumped up with silicone too. You could see where her neck had been tucked and tightened, the skin around her brow and ears pulled unnaturally tight.

  At the bottom of the stairs I startled Zeke by placing the victim in his arms—then headed back up the stairs. The cameraman began taking pictures of Zeke with the woman.

  Rideout followed me.

  “What happened to the fan?” she asked.

  I leaned over and checked the settings—it had been shut off. I pulled the cord and it fired up.

  We’d searched all of floor two but only one bedroom on three. It would be a lousy deal to save one victim only to have another die somewhere else in the house. Because the smoke was quickly dissipating under the pressure from the fan, we raced through the first floor. In the kitchen when I took hold of the cut-glass knob and opened a basement door, a cloud of dirty smoke smooched my face like a drunken lover. It was the first warm smoke I’d felt in this house. I closed the door. We had a basement fire.

  It wasn’t much, because a good fire would have blown me across the room.

  “Upstairs,” I said to Rideout.

  “But the fire.”

  “We’ll finish our search. People first. House second.”

  We raced up two flights of stairs. I was moving as quickly as I could without breaking into a full sprint, gasping for breath. Rideout’s alarm bell began ringing just as we reached the third floor landing. Despite the fan, it was smoky enough up here that we had to search each room by walking around it. Two bedrooms, a bath, and some sort of sitting room. All empty.

  We were downstairs and back out on the wet sidewalk when my warning bell began ringing. Over my portable radio I said, “King Command from Ladder Three. Secondary search all clear.”

  The dispatcher replied, “Secondary search all clear, Ladder Three. Did you receive, King Command?”

  The medics had wheeled our patient away, and now a bewildered Zeke Boles was standing in the lights of a news camera while a woman with a microphone shot questions at him.

  Engine 25 was rolling up the street. When the officer jogged up to me to ask what was going on, I said, “Basement fire. Everybody’s out. The door is in the kitchen in the back. The smoke didn’t seem that hot.”

  “Okay.” The captain turned around and began shouting orders to the three men on his rig.

  Rideout and I went back to Ladder 3 to exchange our empty air bottles for full ones. A medic unit was parked catty-corner from our ladder compartment in back, the rear doors cracked open. I stepped inside and spoke to the medics for a few moments, then to the old woman, who had regained partial consciousness.

  I was kneeling on the wet street changing my air bottle for a fresh one when I looked up and saw Hertlein beside me. “That was the worst display of firefighting I’ve seen in ten years,” Hertlein said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “To start off with, you never, ever, go into a house fire in front of a hose line. That’s how people get hurt.”

  “If we waited for a hose line every time, we’d never get anyone out.”

  “That’s bullshit. I told you not to go into that house.”

  “Did you? I didn’t he
ar.”

  “Did you hear me?” Hertlein said, looking at Rideout.

  Rideout stared at the chief and then at me. It was a few seconds before she replied, her tone apologetic. “Sir. The fan was so loud I honestly couldn’t catch what you said.”

  This clearly was not the answer Hertlein wanted, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. I said, “You runnin’ that fire over there, or did you bring in somebody who knows what they’re doing?”

  “If you’re such hot shit,” Hertlein said, walking away, “how come Boles made the rescue?”

  After Hertlein was out of earshot, Rideout said, “But you carried her out.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  By the time we got back to the house on the corner, Engine 25’s crew was dragging a smoky mattress out the back door of the basement, throwing it down alongside a second smoldering mattress they’d already hauled out. Lieutenant Slaughter was hosing the burning materials down with a limp stream from his 13⁄4-inch line while firefighters began picking at the mattresses with knives to sort out the burning materials.

  There had been two separate fires on this property, as well as a third fire on the other side of the block. We had a pyromaniac.

  Steve Slaughter dropped the hose and threw a heavy arm over my shoulders. “By God, don’t you and I make a team? Huh? We put out two fires with just our two rigs. And a rescue to boot, eh?”

  “I guess—”

  “You’re just about twice the fire officer that Crocker was. God, he was in your spot two years, and it seemed like all he ever did was laugh like a hyena. I’m telling you, Paul, he just about drove me nuts. He wasn’t too bad at a fire, but man, all that laughing.”

  I wasn’t as certain as he was that we were a matched team. I’d been watching him all day and wasn’t sure I liked what I saw. Around the beanery table he was calm and reasonable and had a story for every occasion, most of his tales well told and to the point. He wasn’t even the hero of some of them. But at each of our fires he’d found a different reason to scream at the same people he worked so hard to charm in the beanery, as if yelling at a fire was the normal thing to do. I wondered if, when he was gracing us with tales of his exploits hunting elk, hooking salmon, and killing cougars, he wasn’t leaving part of the story out—the part where he’s screaming maniacally at his stunned prey or his hunting partners.

  The shouting hadn’t touched my crew yet, but I knew from discussions with Dolan and Pickett that it would, and when it did I’d have to decide what to do about it. For me, being around a volatile personality was worrisome, because even though I managed to keep it under wraps most of the time, when it came to the nitty-gritty, I was a lot more volatile than Slaughter ever dreamed of being.

  What I knew about fire scenes was this: Yelling tended to stifle communication. It inflamed the emotions and took the focus off the task at hand. Firefighting was a team effort, and teams worked best when they worked cohesively. A well-drilled crew of firefighters didn’t need to be berated in public. Outwardly, Dolan, Pickett, Gliniewicz, Boles, and Slaughter all got along well, but I knew Dolan and Pickett seethed over indignities Slaughter had inflicted on them in the past, even though, as the Attack 6 officer, Slaughter had no real authority over them on the ladder truck.

  When Jeff Dolan and Mike Pickett came back with the thermal imager, Dolan was angry because he’d missed the rescue on this side of the block. “It was out before we got there,” he said. “They didn’t even need an imager. It was just two shingles.”

  “I coulda pissed and put it out,” said Pickett.

  Dolan said, “You see the tig old bitties on that old lady in the back of the medic unit?”

  Rideout remained silent. I said, “She took a lot of smoke. She might die.”

  “Oh, shit. Really?”

  “You know what Chief Hertlein was doing out here, don’t you?” Pickett said.

  “What? What was he doing?” Rideout asked.

  “Cruising for fires. He’s trying to make himself look good in the papers. I never seen a firefighter wanted to be in the papers more than him.”

  “We found that fire,” said Rideout. “The lieutenant did. The chief didn’t even get out of his car.”

  “Ain’t that a bitch?” Dolan reached down beside the rear duals on our rig. “Who the hell put this here?” It was a Shasta soda pop can, diet black cherry, the liquid sloshing around. He sniffed the opening, made a disgusted face, and heaved the can off toward the north end of the nursing home, where we heard it crash into the blackberries.

  “What’d you do that for?” I asked.

  “It was full of piss.”

  “Was it there when we pulled up?”

  “No way.”

  “You sure?”

  “ ’Course I’m sure. The piss was still warm. I wonder who put it there.”

  An ugly feeling began to grow inside me.

  9. MY BOSS’S BOSS’S BOSS

  Cynthia Rideout

  DECEMBER 6, FRIDAY, 0930 HOURS

  We didn’t get to bed until sometime after four in the morning, and then the engine got up at six for an aid call to one of the local nursing homes. Right now I’m running on adrenaline and coffee.

  Wow.

  Talk about a hayride down a mountain without brakes.

  More has happened to me in the last twenty-four hours than happened all last year. I remember one of the lieutenants in our drill school saying not to get antsy about getting fires after we got out in the company, that sometimes a recruit went into the company and didn’t get a fire for two or three months. That there were cases of recruits not having a fire their entire probationary year.

  Last night we had seven. Granted, they weren’t big fires, but Lieutenant Wollf and I made a rescue. My first shift on Ladder 3—A RESCUE!

  Wollf took the whole thing in stride. He even thought it was funny the news people got mixed up and gave Zeke credit for the save.

  I keep thinking about what Katie Fryer told me about Wollf coming to Station 6 to fire me. Two things worry me. No. Three.

  Wollf didn’t fill out his portion of the daily report yet. I’m worried the reason he didn’t is because he wants to screw me over and he needs some time to think through the wording. He said he was going to wait and fill it out next shift, Sunday. But he also said I did good and that there wouldn’t be any surprises.

  On the other hand, that’s pretty much the same thing Chief Eddings told me at Thirteen’s, and look what she wrote.

  I’ve been thinking about it, and here’s what he might say. I don’t know that he will, but this is what it could be:

  (1) That I didn’t set up the fan properly. I delayed starting it because Chief Hertlein was talking and I knew the moment I pulled the cord we wouldn’t be able to hear him. Wollf seemed irritated with the delay. Then it shut off while we were inside. I suppose that’s my fault too.

  (2) The second negative Wollf might write about me concerns the rescue. When we got upstairs to the third floor and found the woman, I wanted to take her legs, at least—the easy end—but he brushed me off and picked her up in his arms like a baby.

  So what did I do? I got all turned around. I took us into another bedroom and we bumped into things, and all this time that poor woman was getting sicker and sicker.

  This morning the medics called and told us her CO readings had been high but not fatally high and that she was going to make it. I’m so glad.

  (3) The roof. Wollf told Dolan to let me open the roof. But then Dolan went up with the chain saw before I could stop him! Pickett told me I was Wollf’s partner, so I went to join Wollf. Later, I found out he made it up.

  Pickett gave me a lot of tips yesterday, but the theme was basically that firefighting’s a challenging job most people can’t do. He never said I was most people, but I’m beginning to think that’s what he meant.

  The more I think about it, the more I think he saw a chance to step in front of me and make me look bad, and he went ahead and took
it. I hope that’s not true, because I don’t want to be thinking bad thoughts about anybody and, in spite of all his pontificating, I was ready to like Pickett.

  After the Engine 25 guys came out of the basement with the mattresses and determined there had been no extension to the house itself, Lieutenant Wollf and I finished ventilating the house. Those gas-powered fans have large wooden blades that move 22,000 cubic feet of air per minute. They blow air in a cone that spreads as it leaves the fan blade. The idea is to seal up the entrance point with the largest part of the cone. The house gets pressurized. It amounts to the same thing as trying to blow up a balloon. Except, obviously the walls of a house aren’t going to stretch like a balloon. So now all that smoky air is looking for someplace to exit. You open an exit somewhere on the far side of the house and you watch all that smoke go shooting out.

  Here’s something funny. Wollf and I were in the hallway on the second floor, and he was looking at pictures on the walls and said, “Patricia Pennington.”

  “What?”

  “I thought I recognized her. Patricia Pennington. She’s an actress. Her career extended back to the Forties and Fifties.”

  Pennington had been featured in mostly B movies, Wollf said. She had dated some of the biggest male actors of all time. She’d even gone out with Howard Hughes. I think he was filthy rich.

  He started naming her movies. I can’t remember any of the titles, but he knew them all and all the leading men she costarred with. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Spencer Tracy, Mickey Rooney. Those are the names I recognized. It was weird the sudden surge in adrenaline I saw in him—the excitement—like nothing I’d seen during our fires. He handled those fires like they were piecework. But this!

  I followed him to her bedroom, where he pointed out a poster for a movie called River Brand Riders. It must have been printed forty years ago. The date was at the bottom in Roman numerals, but I didn’t stop to figure it out. She costarred with John Payne and Andy Devine.

  Wollf was examining the pill bottles and wine decanter on the bedside table. “Darvon. Taking this with wine would knock her out for a week. No wonder she couldn’t wake up.”