Pyro

by Earl Emerson

  Twenty-five years ago Lieutenant Wollf and a firefighter named Slaughter fought over what to do with an arson suspect. Tonight Lieutenant Wollf and Slaughter fight over what to do with that same suspect. Tonight the positions are reversed. Tonight Slaughter falls into the flames. Wollf remains outside.

  Without thinking, I move.

  Holding a vent pipe with one arm, I grab the sleeve of his coat as he continues to slide in. The roofing material disappears, producing a glorious shower of sparks. Slaughter would have gone with it had I not grabbed his sleeve.

  For five long seconds his gray eyes hold mine, the blind anger in them replaced by supplication. He sees the same irony I’ve seen. That if I let him go, I am doing what he did to my father. That he will burn to death like my father. That the simple justice he was talking about a minute ago will be served.

  All that is left is a strip of roof five or six feet wide on this side of the building along the parapet wall, all of it tipping steeply toward the maw.

  “Don’t let me die,” Slaughter gasps.

  “You let my father die.”

  “God damn it. I was scared. I didn’t have my bunkers. It was too hot. I didn’t know what to do. I was scared.”

  “You miserable coward.”

  He slips farther in as the roof folds under him. Flame creeps up his backside and tickles my face.

  Is this poetic justice? Has God handed me this situation as a gift? Or is it something else? A test perhaps? I forget about fate and go with my conscience.

  Using every available ounce of strength, I try to pull him upward. He doesn’t budge. Feeling the flame against my face, I am tempted to let go. Finally, I pull him onto the lip. He crawls up swiftly under the parapet and puts his back against the parapet wall. He’s been burned. I can’t tell how badly because I’ve been burned too.

  All three of us are going to cook if we don’t start moving.

  Now that he is safe, I let go of Slaughter’s coat sleeve and pull Earl Ward over to the parapet wall too.

  The enormous dimple in the roof continues to enlarge, softening at the edges, snapping off section by section. Earl Ward stares at the flames. Earl Ward is incapable of locomotion. It is clear if I leave him he won’t budge—that he will eventually slide into the fire without a struggle.

  His whole life he’s had a special relationship with fire, but tonight that relationship has gone rancid.

  The fire has brightened the roof until it is almost like a summer afternoon.

  I pull the body loop off Ward’s head and remove the spit-soaked gag. Even though his hands aren’t constrained, he is afraid to remove it on his own. He’s lost a shoe and his sock has holes in it. For the first time in my life I realize what a wretch he is. Burned on the back of his head and his ears from the blowtorch. Dazed. Weeping.

  I stand him up, take his arm, and walk him briskly around the roof, behind the penthouse, where flame is shooting out of the doorway, to the tip of the aerial, which, blessedly, is still there. Towbridge is my hero. The descent will be dicey; flames are encroaching on the rungs near a third- floor window below. We’ll need hose support.

  Stepping up onto the parapet and onto the aerial is a potentially dangerous move; if you slip, you may fall into the street.

  Because I want to be below him, I climb onto the aerial, then reach for Ward.

  I have his hand, like a father holds a child. The image freezes in my mind—as repellent as it is ironic.

  As he steps over the parapet wall, a figure approaches from behind Ward. I’ve been focused on saving Ward, while Slaughter has been focused on getting rid of the only witness who could positively tie him to my father’s death.

  In an instant he’s knocked Ward over the parapet.

  Because I still have his hand, I nearly go over with him.

  I hold on as his body swings violently below the aerial. The movement and his body weight almost tear my arm from its socket.

  I am doubled over the side rail of the aerial, trying not to let go, while he swings limply, his hand softening as if it’s a poorly tied knot coming apart. He is actually looking down to see where he will fall. Where he will die.

  He mutters, “Let me go.”

  “Let him go, dickhead!” says Slaughter, leaning over the parapet.

  I feel the aerial shuddering and know somebody is climbing up behind me.

  When you’re doing something that pushes the limits of physical endurance, you come up with tricks to extend the operation, holding for ten seconds, shifting your position slightly and telling yourself you can hold for another ten in the new position, tricks to con yourself into persevering just a little bit longer than you thought possible. Each millisecond stretches the window for help to arrive.

  We might have gone over together if I hadn’t jammed my left leg through one of the rubber-coated aerial rungs. It hurts like hell, but it is keeping us alive. Should Towbridge decide to extend the aerial, perhaps to lift me and my victim, the scissors movement of the rungs will amputate my leg. I want to look back to warn him, but I don’t dare. Nor do I dare remove my leg from between the rungs. Not if I want to keep Ward alive.

  I lean farther over the railing and grasp him with both hands, the move multiplying by a factor of ten the odds of my falling with him. A collective gasp arises from the crowd below.

  Slaughter leans close. “Come on, dickhead. You think he wouldn’t drop you? You’ll still be a hero.”

  My torso is folded over the aerial’s tall steel guardrail, and the squared guardrail is cutting into my ribs. I feel something in my lower leg burst, and the pain becomes almost unendurable. It is no longer a question of whether I’ll drop him; it’s now a question of whether we’ll both fall.

  I can’t yard him up, because we are both too far over the edge. All I can do is hold on and hope my leg doesn’t snap. If I really work at it, I can hold another five seconds. When five seconds is up, I make myself hold another five.

  I know that if I let go now people will say I’ve made a valiant effort. That I’ve done my heroic best. Hell, I’ll get a medal.

  Slaughter looks at the climber behind me. “Get the fuck out of here!”

  “Go yell at your own crew.” It is Towbridge. “What do you want me to do, Lieut?”

  The crowd below begins screaming when we start. First Earl Ward, and then the crowd below. The lights from the TV cameras are blinding.

  The idea is to get Ward swinging, to gain momentum like a pendulum and swing him up to the edge of the aerial railing, where Towbridge might grab him. With two of us, we might be able to roll him over the rail and onto the bed of the ladder.

  It takes four or five swings before I have Ward moving, each swing taking him farther toward the building, each eliciting a gasp from Ward and a roar from the peanut gallery below. We are both being burned now, he more than I.

  On the second long swing toward the building, his dress bursts into flame. There is nothing I can do about it.

  I slap him up against the aerial, where Towbridge gets a grip on his dress, then his waist. Towbridge begins slapping at the fire on the dress. I am twisted around at an awkward angle, bent like a horseshoe, my leg still locked under a rung.

  I give Earl Ward over completely to Towbridge now and wrestle the rubber boot and my leg out of the gap between the rungs.

  “You got him?” I ask Towbridge, who is still slapping the fire out on Ward’s dress.

  “I think so.”

  Together we roll Ward over the railing and onto the aerial bed. His dress is smoking.

  “You fuckin’ heroes make me sick,” says Slaughter from above.

  75. DWI

  Cynthia Rideout

  MAY 9, FRIDAY, 1201 HOURS

  Things have begun looking up since I got permanently assigned to Ladder 3. I’m taking the place of Pickett, who retired after he came back to work and promptly fell through a floor at another fire.

  Slaughter’s gone.

  In light of the lawsuit against Ed
dings and the fact that four women are now accusing her of sexual harassment, Eddings has been transferred to the Seventh Battalion in West Seattle. I guess the department thinks there aren’t any women working in the Seventh, or that they won’t have any fires while Eddings is there—that her problems will melt away if they move her.

  I’ve decided to testify against Eddings if the case goes to court.

  The night of the fire at The Harvey was wild.

  Including the pyro, there were nine rescues. The people around here tell me I’m not likely to see that again anytime soon. Nobody died, which was a minor miracle.

  All three guys on the roof came down with burns. Slaughter’s were the worst. Wollf was burned on his wrists, neck, and legs. He also had a stress fracture of his tibia.

  Except for the principals, nobody knows for sure what happened up there.

  Later that night, Slaughter, Hertlein, and Chief Smith approached the three of us as we sat on the front bumper of Ladder 3. Tow had rolled the rig two blocks up Cherry, where the shop mechanic was changing the flat tires.

  Chief Smith wanted to know why Wollf hadn’t allowed Slaughter to make the rescue. Slaughter was standing beside Smith.

  For a moment I could feel Wollf tense up the way an animal tenses up just before it pounces on its prey. He could barely walk, was full of smoke, and had a strained shoulder—we had to help him take his bunking coat off—but just for a moment I thought he was going to take Slaughter apart.

  “Slaughter had no intention of rescuing Ward,” he said calmly. “He tried to kill Ward. He wants him out of the way because Ward saw Slaughter push my father into that basement fire twenty-five years ago.”

  Talk about a conversation stopper.

  Slaughter chewed his mustache and stared at Wollf.

  Although his retirement wasn’t official until months later, by the next afternoon Slaughter had vacated the station. Three weeks after that he was involved in an auto accident in Maple Valley we were told would keep him in the hospital for at least a month. To make matters worse, his wife left him and he got ticketed by the State Patrol for driving under the influence the night of the accident.

  It must have been a bizarre experience to be involved in a firefighter’s death and nineteen years later have that firefighter’s son show up on your doorstep as a probie.

  No wonder Slaughter wrote bad reports on Wollf. He wanted Wollf transferred to another station as quickly as possible. But then the Armitage Furniture Warehouse fire came along, and Wollf was suddenly bulletproof.

  76. THE DEAD SQUIRREL

  As the weeks and months pass, it becomes clear that my life has been a botched performance. I’ve grown up hating an invisible enemy, thinking all my troubles stemmed from the pyro who killed my father, when in fact most of my troubles, my anger, my isolation, were of my own manufacture. It didn’t help that I’d murdered a man when I was ten years old. That I’d never had counseling. It didn’t help either that I’d never spoken of it, had in fact put the entire event out of my mind until recently.

  It wasn’t until I passed up my chance to kill Earl Ward that I began to find peace. My old self would have been outraged that Steve Slaughter was going to get away with his actions against my father, but I was determined not to let hate rule my thoughts. If he got away with it, he got away with it. I wasn’t going to let him rent space in my brain. It wasn’t easy to pass up such a splendid opportunity for revenge, but I was gaining ground on my feelings.

  If I could control the impulse to kill my father’s murderer, I could do anything.

  In the days and weeks after The Harvey, I found it amazing to realize how much all that barely submerged hate had compromised my ability to lead a normal life, how it had inhibited me from revealing myself to others.

  After being out of touch with Vanessa for a week, I phoned her. This time I didn’t hang up when she answered.

  “Hey,” she said. “How’ve you been?”

  “I’ve been fine.”

  “You were all over the news. They said you were being treated for smoke inhalation and burns. They said you had a broken leg. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. My leg was only a stress fracture and some bruising.”

  “I thought you did very well on the interviews.”

  “I was nervous.”

  “It didn’t show.”

  “I called because I’d like to take you out to dinner.”

  There was a long silence. “I don’t think so, Paul.”

  “I’ve turned a corner in my life. At least let me tell you about it.”

  “Paul, I’m going to be honest here. I’ve felt attracted to you from the first time I met you, but your anger and volatility worry me. I just don’t see how the two of us have any kind of future together. “

  “I’ve changed.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  It was the most effort I’d expended for a “nice“ girl in quite a while, maybe for any woman ever. I was crushed. I understood what she was thinking, but I was crushed. Then again, getting crushed is part of being alive, and I was now truly alive for the first time.

  In the past few months things have settled down. Neil calls collect and we talk. He says he can’t get over the change in me.

  I’ve spoken to SPD detectives repeatedly, but they aren’t going to charge Slaughter with anything, least of all complicity in my father’s death. The evidence, they say, simply isn’t strong enough to take to court. Ward’s testimony against Slaughter is worthless. Oddly enough, they aren’t going to charge Ward in my father’s death either. Still, he’ll be in prison the rest of his life.

  “Slaughter told me he did it,” I told the SPD detective. “When we were on the roof, he confessed.”

  “That’s a little problematical,” said the detective. “At the time he was about to slide into the fire. The way he sees it, he was telling you what you wanted to hear, hoping you’d save his ass.”

  For weeks I reviewed every conversation I’d ever had with Steve Slaughter, searching for clues he might have inadvertently dropped. For a time I let it eat at me. As infuriating and frustrating as it was to realize Slaughter had gotten away with killing my father—whether through malice, because of an accident, or sheer incompetence—I was determined to suck it up and live with whatever the justice system divvied up for him. A year ago I would have driven out to Maple Valley and run him down with my car. Or shot him. At one point I might have beaten him to death without thought of the consequences.

  What I’d learned was that sometimes you had to let things go. Even big things. That you can’t exact revenge or find justice for everything in life. I knew this much: If I could help it, I was never going to have another man’s death on my conscience.

  Earl Ward sits in the King County Courthouse awaiting trial. For reasons I can’t fathom, he sends me postcards with pleas for money and gifts, his missives scratched out in a barely legible scrawl. I can’t imagine why he thinks I will help him. I read the cards and throw them in the trash.

  The morning after the fire at The Harvey, statewide newscasts played videotapes of Chief Eddings in front of the building screaming at firefighters and citizens in an uncontrolled manner. Editorialists wondered aloud why she hadn’t been given a desk job, but the department had no answer for them. There were a lot of things the department couldn’t answer for, and Chief Eddings was only one of them.

  Three months after the fire at The Harvey, Hertlein was transferred to a desk job in a position that effectively removed his power to interfere in my career or anybody else’s.

  Jeff Dolan’s broken leg healed up and he came back to work. Towbridge continued to swoon the women and make jokes. After his burns healed, Mike Pickett returned to work and within a week fell through a floor at a house fire and retired to live on his boat near Anacortes. Rideout took Pickett’s spot. Slaughter retired.

  I’d about given up on ever seeing Vanessa Pennington again when one night her grandmother’s new housekeeper call
ed 911 at four in the morning. Attack 6 and Ladder 3 were dispatched on a Med 7, along with a medic unit and an aid car. The housekeeper thought Patricia Pennington was having a heart attack.

  On the way into the house, Towbridge and I spotted a dead squirrel in the front yard, a fresh one, each of us mentally marking it for later.

  We ran all the tests on Patricia Pennington, helped the medics put their twelve leads on her, and watched her heart on the Lifepak monitor. It turned out she had only fainted on her way to the bathroom, having gotten out of bed too quickly.

  After the medics told us Pennington didn’t need to go to the hospital, I dashed outside while the others picked up equipment. A few minutes later at the rig, Towbridge said, “I coulda swore I saw a squirrel in the yard when we went in.”

  “Me too,” I said, grinning. I’d had barely enough time to climb into the cab of Attack 6 and perch the dead animal on the console, where it would be facing Gliniewicz when he got in.

  Towbridge looked at me. “A dead squirrel could be real handy around a fire station.”

  “You think?”

  “Let’s go,” said Dolan. “I need to get back to bed.”

  Ignoring him, I walked around to the front of Attack 6 as Gliniewicz climbed into the cab to catch some sleep before the others got there. Half a minute later Gliniewicz opened his left eye and saw all four members of Ladder 3’s crew lined up in front of his window staring at him. Gliniewicz must have seen something in our eyes, because he sat bolt upright and looked around inside the cab.

  None of us actually saw his face when he started squalling, but he must have been within inches of the dead rodent. Gliniewicz was still screaming when he leaped out of the apparatus and sprinted across the yard. “Jesus H. Christ!” he said from behind a nearby tree. “What the hell was that?”

  By then the four of us were laughing so hard Towbridge actually lost control of his leg muscles and rolled into the grass.

  We knew the gag would run for weeks, if not months. Squirrel cartoons would show up on Gliniewicz’s food locker. Stray acorns would be found on the beanery table. Nuts on the hood of his car.