by Lynn, Davida
I nodded, accepting the risks. “Grab a set of irons, probie. We’re going hunting.”
I reached back into the truck and took out the thermal imaging camera. Clipping it to my bunker jacket, I knelt down on the small bit of grass between the road and the sidewalk. After laying my helmet on the ground, I threw my mask over my head. Rico followed suit. As I walked toward the burning structure, I seated the mask, pulled my hood up, and strapped my helmet back into place.
With a twist of my wrist, I opened the air bottle behind me. My PASS device beeped, letting me know how much air I had. I slid the regulator over my mask, popping it in with a click, and sucked hard to pull the first breath from the tank. I looked back, waiting for Rico to catch up with me. I saw him shuffling toward the building carrying the axe and Halligan bar like a handful of sticks. I shook my head. The kid had so much to learn.
I walked past the rapid intervention team, patting one of them on the shoulder. Reading their last names on their bunker jackets, I realized I knew three of the four guys. I gave them a quick salute. All four of them nodded. Between us was the understanding of survival. If something happened to me or Rico while we were inside, they’d be in to pull us out.
Through the static of the microphones embedded in our masks, Rico said, “You ready?”
I’d been tired of his arrogance even before the events in May. Now I was downright done with it.
I grabbed him by his shoulder strap and pulled him so close our masks collided. “You don’t get to ask me that. I ask you that, and you should shit your pants when I do. We’re about to crawl around in a living, breathing monster looking for ghosts. You need to pull your head out of your ass and remember that you don’t know the first thing about fire. You can wave your certificates at me all you want, rook, but you ain’t seen shit.”
I pushed him away, knowing I had extinguished the flame in his heart. It was cruel, but it was also reality. “Let’s go.”
The second floor of the apartment was bare and we were able to stay on our feet for most of it. As we got toward the back of the building, the smoke got thick and I pointed down. We crawled on our hands and knees back through the kitchen and a second bedroom, but it was empty too. Once we got back to the front of the structure, I climbed back to my feet and hustled up the stairs to the third floor.
On the way up, I radioed my shift commander. “Second floor clear, S and R moving to three.” I turned back to see sweat on Rico’s forehead beneath his mask. “You good?”
He nodded. “You?”
I nodded. Overall, I was handling the whole thing better than I thought I would. I was keeping my mind in check and staying focused on the job at hand.
We hustled up the metal stairs. I thought I felt them give a little bit as we ascended.
It was another one of those things I’d look back on later and question.
Rico used his Halligan to bust the door to the third-floor apartment wide open. When he did, heavy smoke pushed out and we both dropped to our knees as it shot above our heads and into the night sky.
I saw dark plumes puff out and then pull back inside as if the building was breathing. A cold thought gripped me and I dove forward and tackled Rico to the metal grating in front of the apartment.
The building shook as a smoke explosion rippled over our heads. I could feel the heat as the air ignited inches above our helmets. A window shattered, raining wood and glass down around me and my partner. The shrapnel became the least of our problems when the landing twisted.
The metal creaked and groaned, pulling itself free from the rest of the apartment. As it began to sag, Rico reached out, frantic to grab onto anything he could. I planted my feet on the banister and punched at his shoulder.
“Give me the axe. Use the Halligan to dig in!”
For a split-second, he didn’t comprehend. Rico hadn’t been in any high-stress situations. But it wasn’t my first time nearly sliding down twenty-five feet to the unforgiving earth below.
He used his free hand to slide me the axe as the landing pulled farther and farther away from the building. I could feel gravity trying to tug me down. I drove the axe into a corner, wedging it in as best as I could. Looking over, Rico wasn’t having the same luck.
He drove the Halligan down, but couldn’t get any purchase. I swung my free leg out to try and give him something to plant on, but we were tilting too far. I let go of the axe long enough to radio, “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Officers McCaffrey and Baggio on the A-side, third story. We need immediate assistance.”
“Copy, we see you.” Clay’s voice came over the radio calm and collected. It was an attempt to keep us from melting down. I wrapped an arm back around the axe.
“Rico, you gotta dig it in. This thing’s gonna go vertical.” My voice crackled through the mask. I had a steady foothold, so I let go with one hand and tore my mask off my face. The heat around us was scorching, but I barely noticed. I turned back to see what was being done to get us down.
Two guys from the first arriving company were rushing toward us with a ladder. Something on the landing gave, and I looked up in time to see a cinder block hurtling straight down. I swung to one side just as it crashed onto the landing. The impact pulled us from the wall an inch or two more and Rico slid further down. I couldn’t hold him steady with my leg.
I could hear his respirator going a mile a minute and I knew that he was panicking.
“You gotta calm down, man.” I tried to coach him, knowing that he’d hyperventilate and pass out. After that, he’d be a ragdoll and a victim of gravity’s steady pull. Rico was clawing at the metal, trying to stop himself from sliding back, but his gloves weren’t getting any traction. My leg was aching with the effort of trying to hold him up.
“Try the Halligan. Lock it into whatever you can, Rico.” My heart was pounding, but I tried to keep my voice calm. “You got this. Twenty seconds and they’ll have a ladder for you to grab onto. Just twenty seconds.”
He turned to me. The inside of his mask was fogged over. He was giving in it. Between the doom of sliding backwards and the blindness, the newbie was letting his panic take over.
Looking over my shoulder, I called down, “He’s gonna drop. Get your fuckin’ asses in gear!” I reached out, trying to get a hold on his rescue strap. It was at the top of his bunker jacket and just beyond my reach. Another lurch, and Rico’s side of the landing released its grip on the apartment wall altogether.
The pipe that I was holding onto buckled, smashing my fingers between it and the wall. Pain shot through me, but I pushed it away as I fought to keep Rico from falling. I was still scrambling to get a grip on him, even as he slid down and out of my reach.
He let out a muffled cry as he slipped from the landing.
“No!” I screamed, reaching for him like it would do any good. I watched him fall, flailing as he dropped the twenty-some feet to the ground. Another firefighter was climbing the ladder just to Rico’s right, and he reached out in vain, too.
I heard the radio crackle, “We have a firefighter down. Pull everyone out, we’re going defensive.”
Every muscle in my body tensed, and if the pipe wasn’t crushing my hand, I might have slipped off along with my partner. Another ladder was thrown up next to me, and with some prying, they were able to get my hand free. I saw blood dripping from my glove, but it meant nothing to me. I had already hung there and watched them strip off Rico’s air pack and load him on a stretcher. By the time I was back on the ground, the ambulance had already left the scene.
I sat on the back bumper of our engine. I had grabbed some gauze and began wrapping my own fingers. Nothing was broken, but I had a few cuts. An EMT tried to take a look at them, but I refused. I didn’t particularly want to deal with people. I knew I’d be dealing with my battalion chief any second. If I was lucky, it would end there. If not, I’d be heading to HQ to talk with some lawyers.
The trails of blood had dried, letting me know that the gauze was doing the trick. I sighed and hung
my head. I watched the drops of sweat fall and land on the pavement. I thought about what went wrong. I should have known how unsteady the landing was. I should have read the smoke better.
“You did everything you could.” Clay’s voice snapped me out of it. Had I been talking out loud?
I looked up. “Sorry, I didn’t see you there.” With all the engines running, I hadn’t heard my commander sneak up on me.
“It’s no wonder. You’re off in What-Did-I-Fuck-Up Land. Let me be the first one to tell you that you’re not at fault here. You saw that explosion before anyone else, and whatever happens to Rico, that’s not on your shoulders. You know that, right?”
I looked up at Clay. He was right, and yeah, I knew it, but it didn’t change much. “How long are they going to put me on leave?”
Work was the thing that kept me going. The shrink already had me on the edge of some forced time off, and I was worried that something like this would be the final nail in the coffin. Worried was an understatement; I was terrified.
He nodded toward my taped-up hand. “How bad’re the fingers?”
I didn’t like him ignoring my question. It didn’t bode well for my chances. “They’ve been worse.”
“They’ve been better, though, ain’t they?”
I nodded. “How’s Rico?”
The shift commander sat down next to me. The fire must have been somewhat under control, or he’d be off directing firefighters. “He had mobility in his extremities. Beyond that, that boy’s got a long road ahead of him.”
I looked down again. I felt tired. I felt like the memory of May was rearing its ugly head all over again. The pain, the weight—it was all coming back harder than before.
Clay’s tone was icy. “McCaffery, look at me.” I met his eyes. “He’s gonna be all right. This isn’t on you. You know what he said when they loaded him into the ambulance?”
“Fuck knows.” Clay stared at me. I gave in. “What’d he say?”
“He said you saved him.”
“I watched him fall twenty feet straight down. I didn’t save him from anything.”
Clay was never one to indulge a fit of self-loathing. “Jesus, Kade. Pull your head out of your ass. This shit happens. You did all you could do. The cards turned up bad for him, and that’s that. If you want me to coddle you, you’re gonna be sorely disappointed. You gotta clear your head. A few days off might not be the worst thing for you. I mean off off. Not side jobs, not work of any kind.”
I looked away and gave a faint nod. He was right. Worse than that, another thought came into my head: I’d have to go back to the doc and tell him all about it. That wasn’t the bad thought. The bad thought was that I wanted to go back to the doc. I needed to get all this shit off my chest. Maybe the shrink had been right after all. I needed to ask him for another card for the soup kitchen, too…
After I poured my coffee, I checked out the volunteer sheet for that day. A few different groups were coming in, which was nothing out of the ordinary. On a Saturday, lots of companies got people together to help out. One name near the bottom of the list caught my eye, though. Before I could think about it, Shatrice walked through the door.
I gave her a smirk. “Oh, look who it is: just the woman I wanted to see.”
She threw her hands up. “Don’t even start with me, girl. You said, ‘set me up with someone.’ That’s what I did. I didn’t know they had to be George Clooney meets Mother Theresa. Give a girl a break.”
I laughed. “At this point, I’d settle for Steve Buscemi meets Salvation Army bell ringer.”
“Girl.” She threw her head back and chortled. I handed her a second cup of coffee and picked up the clipboard.
“Speaking of, check this one out. Bottom of the list. Kade McCaffery. You thinking what I’m thinking?”
She took the list from me and stared at the name. “My money is on female. She’s probably as Irish as they come.”
I shook my head. “Dammit. I was going to say woman. Kade? Maybe she pronounces it Kaydee. Well, Kade is in around ten, so we’ll see.”
The rest of the employees at Helping Hands began to trickle in. Only Shatrice and I played the name game, so we tried to keep our giggles to ourselves. Before our morning meeting, she told me about a few other friends of Darnell’s.
“Did you think about what I said?”
I nodded, “You might—might—have been right. I guess I am looking for perfection instead of an investment. I thought about some of my previous relationships, and I wondered if I could have made it work with them.”
“Mmhm. And what about Aaron?”
“Oh, God, no.” I threw my hands up in the air. “I’ve been on some bad dates, but I have to say that one takes the cake.”
She laughed. “How bad was it?”
I told her about the awkward jokes, him answering the phone to give gaming advice, and after all of that, still trying to kiss me. She covered her face at the end of it.
“I promise I’ll never recommend one of Darnell’s friends again. In fact, you have me rethinking my relationship altogether. I think I might have to call it quits.”
I nodded. “Finally, we can go clubbing together. I need a good wingwoman.”
She and I could have gone on like that for hours, but our boss came in and grabbed a dry erase marker, indicating that work was about to begin.
Leslie Woods was a great boss. She was fully invested in our kitchen and she knew tons of people in our neighborhood. She’d opened Helping Hands in 2009 and had served more than five thousand meals in the six years the kitchen had been open. She was my hero, my mentor, and my inspiration.
“Everyone have their coffee?” She pointed to the windowsill where her cup sat. “I sprang for a double shot today. We’ve got a good crop of volunteers coming in, so I think things should run pretty smooth. A few of the merchants at the farmer’s market chipped in, so today’s mystery ingredients are…”
She dragged it out, making us wait. I got the impression she would have liked us to lean in and gasp in awe. After a few seconds, she pulled open the top of a produce box.
“Cabbage and carrots!”
We all cheered as if it was the greatest thing we’d ever heard. Helping Hands had some of the best employees and Leslie kept our work light and fun, which made it a pleasure to come in at eight a.m. every morning.
She nodded sagely. “Yes, the amazing, wonderful cabbage. I think we have enough that we could do them by themselves. So some steamed cabbage, and we’ve still got plenty of potatoes from yesterday. Mashed potatoes?”
Our group agreed. Lunch would see us serving between twenty and thirty people. Dinner would be somewhere closer to a hundred. It was crucial to properly plan the day’s meals.
After the meeting, I took my station at the industrial sink to start boiling and peeling potatoes. I kept checking the clock. At ten, I’d be in charge of the volunteers. I’d get them signed in, show them around, and get them on a task. At two minutes ‘til, I dropped my last potato into a large pot and washed my hands.
I walked back through the kitchen and toward the offices. With the drying towel still in my hands, I opened the door to our lobby. A man was standing there, his back to me, reading a pamphlet near the door.
I stopped dead in my tracks. My jaw dropped. He didn’t turn around and I took the opportunity to give him a once-over. He was tall and very well-built. Even through his hoodie, I could see that he was in fantastic shape. His hair was mostly short, but with wild brown curls on top. I thought maybe he worked construction or with one of the auto manufacturers. He must have done something with his hands.
