Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  “Four Avenue South and South Main Street?” Sadler said, scanning the run sheet on his way to the apparatus floor. “This has got to be a mistake. That’s nowhere close to our district.”

  “They’ve got two working alarms in the north end,” said Monahan with an exuberance Finney found out of character. There were firefighters who responded to every fire call as if they’d just been handed a ticket to the World Series, but he knew Monahan typically reacted to each alarm as if he were about to have his ass sewn shut.

  A mile from the station, turning off East Marginal Way onto Fourth Avenue South, Finney heard the radio crackle. “Engines Twenty-six, Twenty-two, Thirty-two, and Eleven; Ladders Twelve and Six; Aid Five, Medic Sixteen; Air Twenty-six, Battalion One: Four Avenue South and South Main Street, the Downtowner,” said the dispatcher. “Channel two. Engine Twenty-six?”

  Lieutenant Sadler keyed the mike in his hand. “Engine Twenty-six, okay.”

  “Engine Twenty-six. This was a pull station activated on floor seven.”

  “Engine Twenty-six, okay.”

  Sadler pressed the mechanical siren button on the floor. After all these years the growling of the old-fashioned siren still gave Finney a bit of a thrill. These days it was about the only thrill left.

  8. FOOD ON THE STOVE

  Racking the microphone on the dash, Lieutenant Sadler wrenched around in his seat and raised his voice so Finney could hear him over the siren and the roar of the diesel motor. “That’s your old stomping grounds, isn’t it? Ten’s district?”

  “The Downtowner’s a residential hotel,” said Finney. “The panel’s inside the front door on the left.”

  Formerly a hotel serving travelers from the King Street train station a block away, the Downtowner was now a low-rent, nine-story apartment building inhabited by elderly pensioners, immigrants who spoke little or no English, alcoholics, the formerly homeless, and the recently paroled. Nine times out of ten a call there was a false alarm. In eighteen years at Station 10, Finney had been there hundreds of times.

  It was a long drive up Fourth Avenue through the industrial area, past Sears, the new baseball stadium, the Amtrak depot, and into the lower reaches of Chinatown. This area had been tide flats a hundred years ago. As they passed Station 14, Finney caught a momentary glimpse of recruits practicing behind the tower. His brother had told him they all knew him by name and his story. It pissed him off that most of them probably felt superior to and sorry for him.

  Driving faster than department regulations decreed or his own skills dictated, Jerry Monahan gripped the wheel tightly, his body tipped forward. Monahan was one of those people who, no matter how much training he had under his belt, would still panic in an emergency.

  Finney knew it was a trademark of the Seattle Fire Department that ineptitude such as Monahan’s would be either studiously ignored or steadily rewarded—never punished, rarely corrected, and in most cases barely acknowledged. Common sense having been crippled by an elaborate set of civil service regulations and union rules, chiefs tended to shuffle their problems to other battalions or isolate them in quiet stations where they could do the least amount of damage. In order for Monahan to lose his job or even be demoted from the coveted driver’s position, he would have to be convicted of a felony or commit some other egregious act. Finney feared that what would finally do Monahan in would be running over an innocent pedestrian on the way to a false alarm.

  When they were a mile away, the dispatcher fed them an update. “Engine Twenty-six, we have a report of smoke on floor seven.”

  Facing backward in the crew cab, Finney was already in his tall, rubber bunking boots and multilayered bunking trousers. He’d put on his coat and slipped his arms through the straps of the MSA backpack and air cylinder stored behind the seat. As they approached the address, he saw people spilling out the main entrance onto the sidewalk. This should have been routine for him, the Downtowner, but these days, all he could think about when they went to an alarm was not screwing up.

  “Jesus Christ, stop here,” Sadler yelled at Monahan, who had bypassed the front entrance and was rolling toward the northwest corner of the building. “What the hell’s wrong with you? You should have parked at the front door.”

  Meek as a kitten, Monahan said, “Aren’t we going to charge the standpipe? It’s a fire call, right? A high-rise . . . I charge the standpipe at a high-rise, right?”

  “You stop in front when I tell you to stop in front, goddamn it!”

  These two had been going at each other for the past week. It was hard for Finney to keep from laughing. He’d never worked on a crew quite like this.

  Sadler gave his radio report and then he and Finney jostled their way through the crowd at the front entrance, Finney carrying a heavy dry-chemical extinguisher, Sadler a pressurized pump can. Inside, the alarm bell was deafening.

  When a high-rise went into fire mode, elevator cars were supposed to return automatically to the lobby, but the elevator wasn’t there. “Where the hell’s that car?” Sadler yelled to no one in particular.

  A man with several missing teeth approached through the pack of evacuating citizens covering their ears with their hands. Like Sadler and Finney, he was a head taller than everyone else in the lobby and probably one of the few people in the building who spoke English. “The manager took it up to check on the fire.”

  “To floor seven?” Sadler asked.

  “I guess so. The way I—”

  Finney and Sadler ran to the narrow stairs leading from the back of the lobby and began climbing. In their cumbersome gear they left little room for nervous civilians, who flattened out against the walls when they saw them coming.

  “Cuidado!” Sadler shouted at the descending citizens, his voice echoing in the marble staircase. Finney realized Sadler didn’t know much Spanish, but he liked to flaunt what he did know. “Cuidado!”

  Before they’d gone two flights, Finney could hear Sadler’s heavy breathing, the tax for a lifetime of smoking. Including the weight of the extinguishers, they were each carrying more than eighty pounds of protective equipment. If nothing else, Finney knew he was still one of the fittest firefighters in the department. He would run Sadler into the ground and pretend it was easy. He could do that.

  By floor three Finney was breathing hard, too. By four he felt as if the dry building air was scarring his lungs. Three floors left. Two left. As he approached seven, his legs grew noticeably wobbly. Still, he was far ahead of Sadler.

  Finney waited for Sadler on the seventh-floor landing, breathing deeply. When he finally caught up with Finney, Sadler banged his pump can noisily onto the landing, dropped to his knees, and tried to catch his breath.

  Finney took a few more deep breaths and said, “You all right?”

  “Hell, no, I’m not all right.”

  “Want me to go back and get the Lifepak?”

  “Why don’t you go look around if you have so much extra energy?”

  “Sure it’s not your heart?”

  “Get out of here!”

  Smiling, Finney left Sadler in the stairwell while he went onto the floor, passing two Hispanic men who were punching the elevator buttons as if playing a video game. Unlike the old days when firefighters left their masks outside on the rigs and braved the smoke on their own, now the only time a Seattle firefighter was permitted into a fire building without an SCBA—a self-contained breathing apparatus—was to effect a rescue, and then only if other members with SCBAs weren’t available. Medical treatment for smoke inhalation, once a badge of courage, triggered disciplinary charges these days.

  Two doors down he came upon an apartment with light smoke drifting out of it.

  “Fire department,” he said loudly as he entered.

  Standing in a semicircle around the stove were three mop-haired children and an elderly Asian man. They were mesmerized by a sheet of flame flowing out of the back burner on the stove, consuming a pot and lazily working its way up the wall. Finney hit the pot with a blast
from his dry chemical extinguisher, snuffing the flames in a cloud of retardant. He plucked up the pot and set it in the sink, then turned off the burner and opened a window to let in the autumn breeze.

  “When the alarm goes off, you’re supposed to leave the building,” Finney said, turning to the old man, who smiled and nodded. In another minute or two it would have eaten into the walls and ceiling. Finney took off a glove and put his hand an inch above each of the burners to make sure they were off. Dropping onto one knee to address the oldest of the children, Finney said, “Tell him that first you turn off the stove, then you leave the room and call the fire department. Close the door but do not lock it.”

  “Tapped food on the stove?” Sadler asked, walking through the door and sniffing.

  “Tapped food on the stove.”

  While Sadler code-greened the rest of the incoming units and tried to communicate with the elderly man, who continued to smile and bow politely, Finney looked out the double windows. Seattle sat next to Puget Sound in a huge basin a hundred miles across, mountains on either side. Even low-income housing had a panoramic vista. Finney admired the way the morning sun etched the container ships on the slate-blue waters of Elliott Bay. The angled October sunshine, brightening the whitecaps and making them look like sharks’ teeth, also highlighted the jagged mountains along the western horizon. Finney had always been awed by the snowcapped Olympic Mountains to the west, the Cascade range to the east, and especially Mount Rainier looming in the distance at the south end of Rainier Avenue, as if the city fathers had planted it there.

  Funny. Peering down at the street, he was surprised to see no other units had arrived. Had he and Sadler followed protocol and waited downstairs, a simple food-on-the-stove would have escalated to an apartment fire. It was even possible it would have burned out the whole floor.

  As they left, Finney tousled the hair of all three children. The oldest boy cracked a gap-toothed smile. The old man grinned and half bowed once again. Finney bowed back.

  Downstairs they reset the alarm system and then Sadler chased down the building manager so he could chew him out for his hijinks with the elevator. In the short time he’d worked with Sadler, Finney had noticed the one aspect to the job Sadler relished: dressing down subordinates and civilians.

  9. THE DANGEROUS BUILDINGS LIST

  As a rule, Octobers in the Northwest are soggy, but several weeks earlier an unseasonable drought had developed, bringing with it clear, cold nights and cool, sunny days. When the rains came, the omnipresent dust in this neighborhood would transform into the kind of mud firefighters on Engine 26 had been grumbling about for as long as anyone could remember, the kind that reappeared as a sloppy film on the side panels after you washed them. At least they didn’t have to wipe down the apparatus with a damp chamois, top to bottom, every time it returned to the barn—the procedure during Finney’s first few years in the department, a mandate he assumed had originated from grooming sweaty horses after a run.

  Finney stepped down out of the driver’s seat and began pacing beside the rig, anxious about his scheduled meeting in less than an hour with the chief of the department. He was number one on the lieutenant’s list, and everybody knew the first promotion was to be given out this week. He’d avoided taking the test for years, his reluctance stemming from family dynamics. His father had started browbeating him about becoming an officer the minute he entered the department, and falling into a lifelong pattern, Finney automatically resisted. At thirty-nine he finally saw his extended adolescent rebellion for what it was and realized that his refusal to accede to his father was keeping him from doing the very thing he wanted. Once he’d decided, it was a simple matter to follow through with the requisite studying. Coming out first on the list hadn’t been difficult. The difficulty had been the initial resolve. After Leary Way he went through a period where he regretted having taken the test, wanting to keep as low a profile as possible. But his attitude was slowly shifting, and he now saw making lieutenant as partial redemption.

  While Sadler and Monahan were across the street inspecting buildings, Finney waited alone in the rig parked on Riverside Drive, the Duwamish Waterway a stone’s throw to his right. Somewhere nearby a metal grinder shrieked. It was a sad neighborhood, Finney thought. After World War II these lazy streets had been taken over by industry and commerce, children and families chased away by the screech of trucks and the thump of heavy machinery. Before the war it had been a community of Italian truck farmers, some of whom still resided in tiny houses dwarfed by tall warehouse walls. It seemed to Finney that everywhere he looked, industry, commerce, and the need for a profit were overtaking humanity.

  With nothing else to occupy his time, Finney picked up his portable radio and made a circuit of a two-story vacant house just this side of the waterway. Wind, time, and dust had abraded most of the paint from the outer walls and the boarded-over windows. Long-neglected azaleas and rhododendrons still thrived in the yard. A sepia swoosh marked the front porch, where it looked as if the boards had recently been swept clean of the neighborhood grit. Finney wondered who’d been here.

  Stepping past an old wringer washer on the slanted back porch, he found the door had been forced recently. His small yellow department-issue flashlight in one hand, portable radio in the other, he stepped inside.

  The house was at least a hundred years old, its wood floors scarred from generations of shoes. Mold and the smell of old apples permeated the rooms. The only piece of furniture on the main floor, a couch in the sitting room, was cancerous with black industrial grime that had infiltrated the structure. To the left of the front door a set of stairs led to the second floor, where Finney found three small bedrooms and a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. One bedroom was almost bare, but the others were cluttered with empty Corn Flakes boxes, Pepto-Bismol bottles, crushed Pepsi cans, prescription containers, crumpled newspapers, and filthy bedding. A vagrant must have set up camp here years ago and left after the disorder defeated him.

  Throughout the house the grimy floors were dappled with fresh boot prints. Somebody had been here recently. Not a lot had been disturbed, but it was all to one purpose, and Finney gleaned that purpose quickly.

  Outside in the sunshine Lieutenant Sadler and Monahan showed up at the apparatus just as Finney did.

  “Come on,” said Sadler. “We gotta get you back so you can see the chief.”

  “This place needs to be on the dangerous buildings list,” Finney said.

  Sadler put his clipboard and Notice of Violation pad inside the rig. “You went inside?”

  “Somebody’s got it all set to burn.”

  “This old wreck?” said Monahan dubiously. “Who would bother?”

  “I don’t know, but the wallboard is kicked out around the stairs. There are combustibles stacked in all the right places. It’s balloon construction, too, so the walls don’t have any fire stops in them.”

  “Heck,” said Monahan. “Half the places around here are like that. How about that double-wide trailer down the street? We going to put everything on the list?”

  “We should put this on it. I’ll fill out the form when we get back.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Monahan. “I’ve got a building I’ve been meaning to do myself. I’ll do them both at the same time. You just go downtown and get those bars and make us proud.”

  As they drove back to the station, Finney let the full impact of his promotion wash over him. To be truthful, he had butterflies in his stomach. He’d waited a long time to become a lieutenant. Eighteen years.

  He had to laugh when highfliers outside the department presumed that remaining a firefighter was the mark of a loser. Perhaps it wasn’t exactly the fast track, but riding tailboard had always suited Finney just fine. Reporting for eight twenty-four-hour shifts a month gave him all the time in the world to keep in shape, to take long, rambling hikes in the Cascades or kayak trips through the San Juans, even to start a second business. For a while now he’d been toying with the idea
of building kayaks professionally. He’d already built six of them, sold four, given away two. He liked the work and had every reason to believe that once he set his mind to it, he could make a business out of it.

  But first and foremost he loved the straightforward hard work of firefighting. As a lieutenant he would still be fighting fire, and as a captain; but a chief’s job was all paperwork, personnel problems, and incident command. And those dreadful meetings. Finney couldn’t imagine being old enough or tired enough to want to be a chief.

  Until recently Finney had worked his entire career on one of the city’s eleven aerial ladder rigs, referred to as trucks or sometimes simply ladders, to distinguish them from the thirty-three engine companies in Seattle.

  Engines carried hose, couplings, and nozzles—and usually five hundred gallons of water. The motor served double duty and could run either the rear wheels or a built-in pump. At a fire the driver ran the pump and made the hose connections, while the officer and the nozzleman took a line into the building, where they located the seat of the fire and put water on it.

  Trucks carried ladders, including a hundred-foot aerial, power saws, forcible entry equipment, hydraulic extrication tools, and high-angle rescue ropes and hardware. At fires, truck companies performed forcible entry, searched for victims, and ventilated the fire building, which was just as necessary to putting out a structure fire as a chimney is to a fireplace. Ventilation was accomplished either by laddering the roof and cutting a hole with a chain saw, or by mechanical means, with fans.