Pyro

by Earl Emerson

  Pickett is a Ladder 3 man, but today he’s been detailed to Engine 10.

  “Come on, kid. We’ll do some search and rescue. There’s probably people in those units.”

  Since I can’t find my partner, Towbridge, I go with Pickett to the fan compartment and help him carry one of our power fans. We head up to the second floor with it.

  This is a mess, I think. My partner is supposed to be Towbridge, but I haven’t seen him since we got here. You never lose track of your partner. I am thinking of all the ways I can get into trouble for this.

  It’s a catfight climbing over all the firefighters from Engine 25, as they pull hose lines around their feet and break into the first-floor apartments. These firefighters are all so big with their bottles and bunkers on, we can’t get past them. Finally Pickett starts shoving people out of the way and we manage to get the fan up the stairs.

  On two, I fire up the fan while Pickett kicks in the door to the apartment on the west side. Unlike the doors downstairs, this one bursts open at once. The apartment is clear. Pickett looks at me.

  It’s my turn to kick in a door. It takes me four tries and I tweak my ankle doing it, but I say nothing. Pickett gives me advice, but the fan is making so much noise I can’t understand what he’s said. The door shudders open.

  The unit is filled with black smoke. We’ve found the fire.

  Pickett pulls the door closed to keep fresh air from feeding the fire and gets on his radio to tell everybody what we’ve found. Just as we get covered, two guys from Engine 25 come up the stairs dragging a hose line.

  Pickett tells them, “This is the unit. We’re going in to search.”

  Meanwhile, more firefighters are trying to push their way onto the landing. There are five of us on the cramped landing, plus the fan.

  It has become so crowded I can barely move.

  Pickett taps me on the shoulder, opens the door, and crawls in.

  I crawl in behind him.

  It’s dark and hot. Then, more quickly than I have ever seen it happen, the bubble of clean air from the noisy fan gets in front of us, and all of a sudden we’re standing up and walking around, and it’s like there isn’t even a fire. It’s like we’re just walking into this apartment in the middle of the night, looking for the owners. Looking for kids. The noise from the fan behind us sounding like a small airplane.

  I remember we need to find an exit hole for all the air that’s coming in. We can’t just blow fresh air into a box or it will blow heat back out past us. We need an exit hole.

  We search the small living room, then move into the kitchen. I find a window over the sink, try to open it, then break it out with my axe. Something is wrong.

  Very quickly it begins to grow hotter.

  It gets hotter and smokier. Now we are on our hands and knees.

  I can hear men talking. It seems like their voices should be straight ahead, but they’re to our left. I don’t hear any hose lines being operated.

  We move into an interior hallway. The bedrooms are down here, I am thinking.

  Pickett stops dead. We’ve been moving along pretty smartly until now, but he doesn’t budge for the longest time. I get closer, but it is too hot.

  Pickett’s face is in the carpet.

  And then he is backing up over me, and I tell him to take it easy, but before I can even finish saying it, he’s crawled over me. I don’t know what’s going on.

  Has he found a victim? Is he carrying a child?

  He stands up and bumps into a wall hard. I pile into him. “What’s going on?” I say. “Where are we going?”

  He doesn’t reply. He just gets low again. The atmosphere at head height is like a firebox.

  I’m thinking he panicked. He panicked and is running out of the building. I’ve seen it happen one other time. In drill school a recruit threw the hose line down and ran out of the building—then got fired for it.

  We’re crawling over a coffee table, and I’m trying to figure out how it suddenly got so hot in here and why Pickett is taking us in the wrong direction, because the closer we get to the doorway, the closer we should be getting to the fan, yet the noise of the fan is not in front of us. And then a group of firefighters are butting heads with us, crawling smack into us, and I realize we are in the doorway.

  By the time I get my bearings, Pickett is gone. I step outside and see him vanish down the stairwell, crashing into firefighters who are coming up. One of them looks at Pickett and steps back, as if frightened by what he’s seen.

  I follow him into the street, past the twenty-five-foot ladder we put up earlier, past Chief Eddings, who is screaming at someone. I mean screaming, “Get your fucking ass over there!”

  She looks right at me but doesn’t see me. This really is the first time I’ve been to a fire with Eddings, and it’s a whole new side of her. My God, she’s frightened half to death.

  Pickett hasn’t taken his face piece off yet. I am surprised when he zeroes in on a paramedic standing across the street from the fire building. A short, gray-haired man.

  The medic gets an alarmed look in his eyes and starts helping Pickett with his helmet and face piece. Pickett’s been burned. I can see the marks on his face, blistered and black, like dirty bandages where his face piece wasn’t protecting him, burns laid out in patches with straight margins; one edge where his face piece didn’t cover him, the other where his collar came up and protected him.

  It didn’t seem that hot. I’m not burned.

  The second medic springs into action and they put Pickett on the gurney, handing me his equipment piece by piece as they strip him, telling me the department will want to take pictures of the gear.

  Half a minute later Chief Eddings is crowding me in the doorway of the medic unit. “What’s going on here? What the hell is going on?”

  “Just treating our patient,” says one of the medics, without looking up from her work. Pickett is joking with them, although you can tell he is in pain.

  “Why didn’t somebody tell me about this? Jesus. Rideout! Is this your doing?”

  “Chief, we were up there, and all of a sudden he had to come out.”

  “Why didn’t somebody tell me?”

  I don’t know what to say. Finally Pickett says, “Chief? Why don’t you blow it out your ass?”

  Over the airwaves we hear Engine 25 announce they have the fire knocked down and are checking for extension. Finally the female medic says, “Chief. He’s got drugs on board. He’s not responsible for what he’s saying.”

  “I’m not?” Pickett smirks. “Good. Chief. Why don’t you retire and make room for somebody who knows what the fuck they’re doing, somebody who cares about the people they work with, which you sure don’t?”

  Pretending she hasn’t heard him, Eddings gets on the air and yells at the dispatcher who asked her whether she received the report that Engine 25 had knocked down the fire. “Of course I received the report. What do you think I’m doing here?”

  After that she began barking orders at various crews. She hollered at Connor and LaSalle, the Marshal 5 investigators. She called LaSalle a “fuckin’ idiot.” Got into a shouting match with Battalion 6.

  Later, I was in rehab in my damp T-shirt, halfway between feverish and shivering, drinking Gatorade and munching chocolate chip cookies the fire buffs had provided, when I saw Eddings staring at me from across the yard. For some reason her look reminded me of the time up at Station 13 when she came into the bunk room after lights out, ostensibly to ask me when I wanted to schedule my upcoming holiday. It had been dark and she sat on my bunk, and before I knew it she had her hand on my thigh, was slowly rubbing my leg and hip. I asked her to stop. At first she pleaded ignorance. “Stop what?” she said. When I picked up her hand and removed it from the blanket, she said, “Oh, that. Don’t mind that. It’s just us girls here. I do that unconsciously. It don’t mean nothing.”

  But there had been no mistaking the meaning—not then or the second time it happened before I was transferred
to Station 6.

  Towbridge, who was sitting on the grass next to me in rehab, noticed Eddings staring in our direction. He chuckled and said, “She ain’t always like this at fires.”

  “She isn’t?”

  “Nah, she gets worse.”

  This morning when we visited Pickett in the hospital, Towbridge got him laughing so ferociously they threw us out.

  Wollf and I had already retraced our path inside the apartment. We knew, because I was behind him, that I had probably taken a great deal less heat than Pickett. It was hard to imagine it had been that much less, but hey—Pickett was burned. I was not.

  “ ’Sides,” added Towbridge. “Everybody knows Pickett never goes into a fire without getting hurt.”

  Dolan looked at me. “It’s true. He falls off a ladder. Something hits him in the head. Every time we get a fire call, he starts planning what he’s going to do on his time off. You heard him. He’s going to work on his boat.”

  None of this made me feel any better.

  24. NOBODY EVER GOT HURT ON ONE OF MY RIGS

  Rideout looked at me and wiped a tear off her brown cheek as the medics worked on Pickett. There were black and red marks down the sides of his face in the shape of parallelograms.

  You could tell he had drugs on board, because he spoke with the failure of restraint you see in a mouthy drunk.

  “We went through the first two rooms,” Pickett said. “I guess that’s where I heard a window breaking.”

  “That was me,” Rideout said. “I broke the kitchen window.”

  “I don’t know why. We had an exit for the smoke.”

  “We did?”

  I spoke gently. “You turn the fan into the doorway of a place that small and if you don’t have an exit you know right away because it comes right back on you. You had one, all right. So you had the fan running?”

  “We fired it up and went in,” Pickett said. “The hose line was right behind us.”

  “The hosers never came in. We ran into them in the doorway when we came out,” said Rideout.

  “So what happened?” I asked.

  “We were headed down this hallway toward the bedrooms. It was hot, but then all of a sudden it starts to get real hot. My face felt like it was getting burned around the edge of my face piece, you know, like I didn’t have my hood sealing the face piece, so I tried to adjust it. When I moved the hood a little bit, I got burned. That was when I knew my hood was already in place.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked, turning to Rideout.

  “I’m fine.” The upper half of the Ladder 3 decal on the front of her helmet was singed. Maybe she hadn’t been burned, but she’d come close.

  “Was there anybody in the apartment?” Pickett asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “I think it was the fan,” Rideout said.

  “What about the fan?” I asked.

  “I don’t think it was on when we came out.”

  “It wasn’t,” said one of the paramedics.

  “Maybe you were too aggressive,” said Chief Hertlein, placing his enormous bulk in the doorway of the medic unit behind Rideout. “I’ll expect to see that reflected in her report.”

  “What are you talking about?” I said.

  “It’s pretty obvious she was too aggressive and got her partner burned because of it.”

  “That’s not what happened, Chief.”

  “They were way too aggressive. Both of them. I want you to write her up.”

  “Since when are we looking for timid recruits? When I was teaching drill school, we drummed it into recruits that they needed to be aggressive. First one through the door gets the job.”

  “There’s a difference between being aggressive and being stupid.” Hertlein gestured at Pickett. “That’s the difference right there.”

  “Hey, Chief,” Pickett said. “Sometimes it’s just a hazard of the profession.”

  “Every time anybody gets hurt,” Hertlein said, “you look around, you’ll find somebody did something stupid.”

  “So walls never fall on anybody?” I said. “Bricks never pop out of chimneys?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t think I do.”

  “Nobody goes inside in front of a hose line.”

  Pickett tried to sit up, but the female medic put four fingers on his chest and pushed him back down.

  “Nobody goes inside in front of a hose line?” I said. “Are you kidding me? Maybe we better start stuffing hose in that ladder compartment. Then when we go up to a house fire, we can carry a fifty-five-foot ladder, a couple of fans, a generator and light cord, our chain saws, and a couple hundred feet of hose too. That would be terrific.”

  Towbridge laughed.

  Silencing Towbridge with a look, Hertlein swept his eyes back to me. “Listen to me, you blasted idiot. You damn well better learn how this man’s fire department operates! To start off with, you never back-mouth a superior officer. Especially one that can move your butt to the commissary warehouse tomorrow morning.”

  Last summer when I popped him, I hadn’t been angry. Violence often erupted out of a deadly calm deep inside me. Now I was so angry I could barely get any words out. What frightened me was that I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had no idea.

  Sometimes things simply happened. Bad things.

  “When I worked on Three Truck,” Hertlein continued, his voice growing soft, “we had more fires than you’ve probably seen in your entire career. In all that time nobody who ever worked for me got hurt.” One of his sentences would be whisper-soft, the next shouted. It was as if he wanted you to turn your hearing aid up so he could yell into it. “You’re lucky I don’t transfer your ass right now, tonight!”

  “I been transferred before, Chief. It doesn’t bother me.”

  He turned around and confronted Eddings, whose face was pale and blank. “I want them here after everybody else is gone,” Hertlein said. “Make them the last unit to go. Put ’em on fire watch. And don’t let them give you any bullshit about wanting to go up to the hospital to see Pickett. By the way, young man.” He gave me a long look through his misty spectacles. “I’m going to talk to Safety. There will be a report.”

  Hertlein stalked off. Eddings raised her eyebrows and gave me a look, then sighed. Maybe I was wrong, but I had the feeling what I was seeing on Eddings’s face was respect. She’d been in her share of hot water over the course of her career, and I think she recognized in me a kindred spirit—two shit magnets in the same battalion.

  Eddings walked away, rolling on the outer edges of her feet. Towbridge followed for a few feet, mimicking the waddle perfectly.

  “You going to be all right?” I asked Pickett.

  “Long as they keep shooting me up with morphine. I don’t know how I’m going to get my fix when I get back on the street.”

  “You’re gonna have to start turning tricks,” Dolan said.

  Everyone laughed except Rideout. Nothing in the world could have made her laugh.

  “You guys have yourselves a nice fire watch,” Pickett said. “I’ll be up in the hospital playing footsie with the nurses.”

  “Look,” I said to Rideout after the medic unit left. “It wasn’t your fault. It was up to him to know how much heat there was around him.”

  “He looked so dreadful. I got in his way. I think I delayed his exit.”

  “Hey,” said Dolan. “Like we told you, Pickett gets hurt at every fire he goes to.”

  “We’re not shittin’ ya,” Towbridge said. “At the potato warehouse fire down on Rainier last year he got his leg caught in a ladder. Was hanging upside down when we found him.”

  We were side by side replacing equipment in compartments on our rig, standing under the upraised compartment doors to shield ourselves from a chill rain that had started to drop out of the night, when Dolan turned to me. “Maybe he never got anybody on his crew hurt, but he sure as hell banged up some other crews.”

  “Who?”

 
“Hertlein. I thought he was my friend. Now he goes and keeps us out here all night on fire watch. They don’t need no fire watch out here. Why did he have to go and do that? I helped him build the deck on his house.”

  “What do you mean he banged up some crews?”

  “Instead of running the saw up and over the rafters to save the frame and then picking the roof sheathing off with axes, you know, leaving some integrity to what you’re standing on, he would dip the saw blade down in and cut the whole thing out, a big old chunk. Roofing, sheathing, and rafters.”

  “Didn’t the section drop into the house?”

  “You bet it dropped into the house. I kept telling him he couldn’t do that. First couple times we got lucky and the roof landed in the attic. Then one night we’re on this duplex and there’s a good fire underneath us and he cuts this huge piece out of the roof, maybe six-by-eight. It dropped into the house and hit three firefighters from Thirty-three’s. All three of ’em went to the hospital. We were lucky they didn’t end up quadriplegics.”

  “What came of it?”

  “It got swept under the rug. And you know what else? He hates fans. Hertlein sees a fan at a fire, he turns it off.”

  “You’re kidding me, right? That’s like sending a guy down a hole and then cutting his rope.”

  Towbridge looked at me. “Maybe he turned off Pickett’s fan.”

  “We should ask those Engine Twenty-five guys,” Dolan said. “They were in the doorway. They would have seen it.”

  25. LASALLE, CONNOR, AND FIVE SNOT-NOSED ARSONISTS

  It was pouring rain when the two investigators from Marshal 5 showed up, LaSalle and Connor. Our job was to secure the fire scene and provide lights and manpower for their investigation, to secure the property after they were finished, and then sit around for the rest of the night, since Hertlein had ordered us to stay.

  LaSalle’s father had been mayor of Seattle thirty some years ago, and LaSalle was a paunchy, soft-looking replica of the old man. Marsha Connor was softer than LaSalle. She had what Towbridge called a teacher’s underbelly, a mound of flesh below her belt that sedentary people sometimes accumulate in middle age. In fact, now that I thought about it, LaSalle and Connor looked like a doughy husband and wife who’d been eating in the same restaurants for decades. That’s where the resemblance ended. LaSalle was as cocksure of himself as Connor was fraught with uncertainty.