Vertical Burn

by Earl Emerson

  “How was Bill faring when you went back in the second time?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “He would come home after you guys had a fire and lie on the couch all day. Totally bushed. I’m wondering . . . did you ever think about not going back in with that second bottle?”

  Finney had to think about how he was going to word this.

  42. LIKE TAKING A NAP

  “To be honest, Bill and I didn’t think about anything except finding those victims.”

  “That was just like Bill.”

  “Yes, it was. While we were inside on our first bottles, Engine Thirty-five showed up and then Engine Ten and Engine Five. Engine Ten ended up taking a line inside the warehouse. We saw their line, but we never saw them. Twenty-two’s crew got a supply line from a hydrant to their rig and followed Ten’s inside with a secondhand line. They never found any fire either. Thirty-five’s showed up at the north side of the building, where a large volume of black smoke was pouring out the windows and rolling down the street. Visibility was so bad they were afraid they’d crash into another rig if they continued driving, so they stopped right there, assuming they were at the location.”

  “Without any other units, where did they think everybody was?”

  “Good question. The incident commander didn’t hear the announcement that they were at the location, but the incident commander from another fire going on at the same time mistakenly believed they’d arrived at his fire. He told them to take hand lines to the front of his building and wait for a second crew who would help them hold the exposures. Nobody caught the mistake.

  “Thinking they were at the front of the building, Thirty-five’s crew stood with a dry line for almost twelve minutes while the fire continued to build. There weren’t any exposures to protect, and although they couldn’t see anybody inside, they thought fire crews were working their way through the building from the other side and that the IC was telling them not to push the fire onto those crews. They tried to get a clarification of their instructions, but channel one was completely jammed, three separate incidents using it by that time.”

  “I thought your fire was on channel two?”

  “It was. They were on the wrong channel. Meanwhile Ladder Five arrived and went to the roof, where they opened two holes on the older buildings. They found no fire and stalled two chain saws in the hot tar on the roof and then an XL-98. That’s a rotary saw. By the time they were brought down to help with the search, they were exhausted, and even though they’d cut three good-sized holes with their axes, the building still wasn’t venting.

  “Three more engines arrived. Engine Six. Engine Seventeen. And Engine Twenty-one. They were put to work laying supply lines to hydrants and taking hose lines into the interior from the south side of the warehouse, where they had almost no chance of reaching the fire. By now there was more smoke buildup, and the holes Ladder Five had cut earlier in the roof were beginning to produce flame.

  “By this time the crew of Engine Thirty-five was frantic. The officer, a firefighter acting as a lieutenant, took matters into his own hands and entered the building with his team. Soon after, Engine Twenty-four arrived and went in behind them. This was the correct side from which to attack the fire, but it was too little too late. By now, the old, wooden buildings were raging. Engines Thirty-five and Twenty-four got less than thirty feet inside the door.

  “Meanwhile, Bill and I searched the warehouse and started on our second bottles. We made our way across the courtyard and into the older buildings to the north. Eventually we found the room the band rehearsed in. That’s where the wall came down on us.”

  “You must have thought you were about to die.”

  “I didn’t think either one of us was going to die.”

  “Not even when you were wandering around?”

  “I don’t remember all of it. My recollection is that when I ran into Reese and Kub I told them exactly where to find Bill. The problem is, when you’re that tired and you’ve taken as much smoke as I took, just about anything can come out of your mouth.”

  “They said you didn’t give directions. But like you said, the smoke and . . .”

  “I don’t think anybody found the door we’d used. On the north side in the older buildings they finally knocked down some of the fire and searched there, too, but they were on the wrong side of the fire wall. Then when the roof started to collapse, they called everyone out. Flame had gotten into the warehouse by then and ignited hot gases that had been collecting near the ceiling.”

  “So they pulled out and watched Bill die?”

  “If they hadn’t, they would have lost more people. Bill wouldn’t have wanted that.”

  “No.”

  “Anyway, judging from the time line and the amount of smoke, Bill died before they pulled out.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Nobody’s sure. His last radio transmission was at zero-three-fifty-one. They pulled everyone out at zero-four-oh-two. I don’t think he lived to see four o’clock.”

  Emily’s eyes watered over for the first time. “A fire wall? What’s that?”

  “An extra-thick wall built into a building to keep a fire on one side or the other. A paint company, say, might use it between the warehouse and office. It was an old wall, put in there God only knows how many years ago when the place sold lumber. It was a two-hour wall—built to keep flame out for two hours. The biggest portion of the older buildings was put up in 1919, added onto later. Bill and I entered that section on the east side of the wall. Chief Reese and his partner were the only ones on our side.”

  “I just . . . can’t help thinking how . . . horrible it must have been.”

  “If it’s any help, Milt Halpern got trapped in a fire a few years ago. Fourteen-hundred-degree temperatures down to the floor. He got tired and couldn’t move, and then he lay down. He said it was like taking a nap. He got burned pretty good, too, but he didn’t feel it. You wear those bunkers, you get cooked. It’s different from what you’d think.”

  “What happened to Milt?”

  “A firefighter just happened to be standing fifteen feet away in a doorway, blacking out the room with a two-and-a-half. A guy named Gary Sadler. He spotted Milt and dragged him out.”

  “He didn’t feel anything?”

  “Like taking a nap.”

  The phone rang, and as Emily stood up to get it he wondered what it would be like to lose a spouse of thirty-five years. He was hurting, but he didn’t have to give away Bill’s fishing tackle or find a home for his hunting dogs. He didn’t have to figure out what to do with Bill’s tools or his shotguns or his fire department uniforms. Or the folded flag from his coffin.

  “Okay,” Emily said, hanging up the phone. “Why didn’t Reese and Kub find him?”

  “It was a big place. Lots of smoke. Reese says they searched until the fire chased them out.”

  “How far away was Bill when you met them?”

  “About seventy-five feet.”

  “I suppose they searched as long as they felt they could.”

  “That’s my understanding.”

  She looked at him with her wide doe eyes. As she walked him out of the house, Emily Cordifis detoured into the room Bill had converted to a combination den–sewing room after their youngest daughter moved out. “Some papers I found. Mostly department stuff. I haven’t really had the heart to sort through them. I would appreciate it if you would return anything that needs to be returned.”

  He took the envelope from her, and said, “Emily I have to tell you something.”

  “What is it?”

  “I was lost.”

  Emily stepped forward and, without uttering a word, kissed Finney’s cheek. “Of course you were. Who wouldn’t have been? John? Next month would have been our thirty-sixth wedding anniversary. The girls and I have decided to hold a celebration of his life, and we want it to coincide with our anniversary. Everybody’s going to be here. Marion, the whole gang from Station Ten. G. A. Mont
gomery. Chief Reese has promised to make a speech. Say you’ll come. It wouldn’t be complete without you.”

  “I’ll be here,” he said, though he didn’t know how he could ever celebrate with that bunch. Anyway, he’d probably be in jail by then. He kissed her brow and left.

  43. THE DEATH ROOM

  Finney was driving his father’s 1948 Universal pickup truck, the same vehicle he’d borrowed as a teenager, the truck he’d parked on the West Seattle golf course on so many frustrating Friday nights with Sally Morrison. After high school Sally, still a virgin, went on to Western Washington University in Bellingham. Rumor had it that she’d married a podiatrist in San Bernardino and had two kids, a Great Dane, and an artificial hip. Finney had dated only two girls in high school, a statistic that had caused his older brother to label him a “social retard.”

  With the mist-covered Lake Union to his left, he drove past Gas Works Park to Thirty-sixth and then to Leary Way. The fog was slowly crawling up from the lake, the streets dark enough now that alert drivers had turned on their headlights. The area was a mixture of residential and industrial blocks.

  The ruins on Leary Way were much as the fire department had left them, the fire ground encircled with fence poles anchored in concrete blocks and holding up Cyclone fencing that well-wishers had decorated with flowers, cards, handwritten notes, and along one section, teddy bears and stuffed animals.

  Little had been removed from the scene. The day after the fire Bill’s body was taken away, and then two days later the melted junction box G. A. said had caused the fire was dug out of the wall and taken downtown where it was displayed for months atop G. A.’s desk. The rubble from the fire had been pushed into piles along the remains of the interior walls. In some spots the rubble had sunk into what remained of the basement, so that it looked like an enormous swimming pool filled with sludge.

  Finney came here only at night and found it looked sinister in a way that the actual fire in June had not. He rolled to a stop in a cul-de-sac, parking the old pale green pickup on the north edge of the ruins, where Engine 35 had parked that night. Over the summer, a fast-growing thicket of blackberries had woven their way into the fencing and formed a screen that obscured his parking spot from motorists.

  Finney stepped into his fire department coveralls, put on a pair of Ranger Firemaster rubber boots he’d worn for years on Ladder 1, a helmet with a lamp on the front that he’d bought at Safety and Supply, and made his way through a wing in the Cyclone fencing into the labyrinth. Twenty feet inside the fence, he lifted a set of charred planks and removed a D-handle shovel and a long, steel bar. He put on a pair of work gloves and carried the tools along a well-trod path in the rubble.

  He entered from the north and walked through the remains of the first three rooms, heaps of bricks, mortar, and broken boards forming irregular igloos of trash.

  The crew of Engine 35 had reported the hottest part of the fire had been in the room Finney was now working in, sixty to eighty feet inside the northwest doorway. Wind had blown the flames through the complex, and then, later, through the high windows into the adjoining warehouse.

  Finney scrutinized the area at his feet in the dim light from his helmet and began shoveling. A week ago he’d worked until almost three in the morning, had cleared three-quarters of the room.

  Tonight he scooped up the rest, using the bar to lever out the larger chunks. Finney turned his handheld flashlight on and began searching for burn patterns on the floor. Pawing through the pile behind him, he thought he detected the faint aroma of gasoline on two boards. Oddly, when gasoline was used as an accelerant, the odor oftentimes remained long after the structure burned, especially if it had seeped into cracks in the floor or woodwork. Had they used dogs during the initial investigation, they might have found this, but G. A. Montgomery had nixed the idea of using another agency’s accelerant-sniffing dogs—Seattle had none of its own.

  It was the second time he’d found the odor of gasoline. Last month he’d detected it in a room adjoining this one. It was possible the gas had been in a container that melted in the heat, that the odor had been produced after the fire started, not before, but Finney didn’t think so. Still, his findings would never hold up in a court.

  G. A. would say Finney had spilled the gas himself.

  Minutes later Finney found himself in the room where Bill Cordifis died. The room had been scoured down to the floor. Anything he wanted to learn from it was either in the official report or in the sixteen-foot-high debris pile they’d built alongside it, and he’d already sifted through that piece by piece. In the process he had moved it thirty feet to one side. It had taken over a month, and he’d found dozens of artifacts, including the melted remains of a drum set, a wristwatch, parts from an electric guitar, components from a sound system, and one heat-congealed condom still in its foil wrapper.

  He’d been here many times since June. He knew it was a fluke the wall had trapped Bill instead of him. He also knew that had their fates been reversed, Bill wouldn’t have had the strength to chop through the wall, that the two of them would have died here together. He looked down. His hands were trembling.

  Until Leary Way he’d never been afraid of death. He’d always thought of it as an event somewhere in the distant future, an event he didn’t need to contemplate. These days, he pondered death constantly. Bill’s death. His father’s death. His mother’s. The deaths of everyone he knew or had known or ever would know. It wasn’t healthy, but there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  What made this gloomy meditation so ruinous was that Finney had also discovered he no longer believed in God. Heaven, he now surmised, was a human invention to alleviate the universal fear of death. He’d become convinced on a visceral level that when you were dead, you simply ceased to exist, that in some ways it must be like a very deep sleep.

  A deep sleep. Wouldn’t that be nice? he concluded. He hadn’t indulged in genuine all-night wake-up-and-wonder-where-you-are sleep for half a year.

  The band room was clear now, just four walls, or what was left of four walls, a rectangular patch of flooring. In spots the linoleum was intact. On the north side of the room there had been a corridor, and it was along this corridor that much of the smoke and flame from the initial fire had traveled, gradually eating into the north wall, weakening it until it collapsed on them.

  Tonight Finney was determined to retrace his escape route from the room.

  It was only the second time he’d had the gumption to attempt this.

  It took a while to find the place where he’d hacked through the wall with his service axe; most of the wall was gone now, either destroyed by fire or dismantled by work crews. Once again, he marveled at how it was narrower than he remembered.

  He’d squirmed through the wall and turned right, found himself wedged up against a large diesel motor. He’d turned back past the exit hole and gone through a doorway into a room that was approximately twenty-five by forty and shaped in the form of an L so that, given the machinery on the floor and the smoke, it was easy enough to see how he’d become disoriented.

  He’d been here when Reese and Kub opened the door on the east side of the building, when the fresh air from their entrance fed the overhead gases and caused them to ignite. Had they come in quickly and sealed the door behind them, there would have been little change in the atmosphere, but they left it open, so that gallons of cool air supplied the starving fire with the oxygen it had been craving.

  Had he not had his face pressed to the floor in an effort to suck up every last lungful of good air, he would have been burned alive.

  Eventually, he’d made his way out of that room via a doorway at the south end. It was cooler in the next room, and he’d stood up for the sake of speed, keeping the wall to his right. It was here that he counted his footsteps from the PASS device, having returned to the point at which he’d started.

  Twenty-eight paces.

  He remembered that much.

  Retracing his path, he
made the count again—twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight—and found himself stepping across a pile of one-inch steel pipes under the debris.

  The pipes were ten feet long, eighty or a hundred of them. He had no idea why they’d been stored in the corridor. They had made a horrible racket just as he met up with Reese and Kub, a hundred steel pipes weighing hundreds of pounds falling to the floor.

  It was clear that had he been a few feet farther back, the pipes would have killed him.

  He met Charlie Reese and Robert Kub, gave them directions, or thought he did, then proceeded along the corridor, at the end of which he was later found muttering to himself, making no attempt whatsoever to exit the building.

  Now at the entrance to the building, he turned around and retraced the route Chief Reese and Robert Kub had taken. According to their report, they searched one small office before proceeding west along the corridor. Stepping it off, Finney calculated they traveled eighteen paces into the building before they met him.

  Finney remembered telling them to listen for the PASS device, which other firefighters later reported hearing as they shot water into the interior. He remembered telling them about the hole he’d chopped. He remembered repeating the number twenty-eight. He remembered it, but even as his memories replayed that night, he didn’t know if they were dreams or memories.

  The pair said they’d explored for as long as the heat allowed, and by accounts of independent observers, they were inside ten or eleven minutes after Finney met them.

  Finney placed himself at the spot in the corridor where he’d met Reese and Kub. To his left was another, smaller corridor. Kub had told him it was where they’d spent most of their search-time before being chased out of the building.