Firetrap

by Earl Emerson

  “No, sir.”

  “And you didn’t pass anybody in there?”

  “No, sir. Not that I knew of.”

  We shook hands, and Hinkel left. I shut off my recorder and looked at Brown. “This is going to be tough.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The fire seemed to spread pretty fast.”

  “In the old days, builders didn’t put fire stops in the walls. A fire stop is a simple two-by-four, usually, nailed in crossways between the uprights. You get a fire in a building as old as the Z Club, it’s easy for a basement fire to travel all the way to the roof running right up through the walls. In newer buildings, fire stops hold the fire back for a while.”

  “Hinkel said they should have gone in the back door and worked their way to the front, instead of the other way about. Is that right?”

  “Generally when you hit fire with a hose line, you want to work from the uninvolved portion of the building to the involved portion. Otherwise you push the fire to parts of the building it might not spread to on its own. A water stream pushes the fire, just like sweeping a pile of debris.”

  “So this might be the mistake that underlies this whole situation?”

  “There was no way they could have been sure they would have gotten in on the other side of the building, and the wind was blowing the wrong way. On the other hand, it might have been a mistake.”

  “And then there was the door to the upstairs. Don’t you think if they’d found that sooner they might have saved the stairs?”

  “Nobody can say for sure. But if they had, a lot of people could have come down those stairs.”

  “Okay. A few more questions. What’s a jiffy hose?”

  “You really took notes, didn’t you?”

  “I always do.”

  “A jiffy hose is a standard garden hose. We carry them for cleaning off our gear after a fire.”

  “And a thermal imager?”

  “It’s a handheld camera that shows heat. Like infrared. It sees through smoke and through walls. We’ve got one on the truck right outside. I’ll show it to you.”

  Trey took me out to the apparatus bay, where he climbed into the truck and came out with what appeared to be a handheld camera the size of a tiny portable TV. “Truckies carry this into a fire, and it can essentially see through smoke. It senses heat and has a scale along the side here that tells you the temperatures you’re looking at.” He turned it on, and a small black-and-white screen lit up. Then he pressed his palm against the side of the ladder truck for a few moments, and when he removed it, the camera showed the heat from his palm print on the sheet metal of the truck. Everything warm in the camera was white. His face and arms were white.

  9. SHOE SALE

  FIREFIGHTER HERBIE SCHMIDT, AID 14, C SHIFT>

  We help Ladder 7 put up their aerial on the B side of the building, but just as we’re getting ready to go to the roof, somebody asks for the aid car on the C side, so me and Alan Francher drive the aid car around the block and park. I look up and there’s a ground ladder going up to this smoky window on the second story, a good twenty-five feet to the window.

  There’s four or five civilians crumpled on the ground at the base of the ladder, all kind of lying there like they’re hurt. Another guy’s limping toward me. There’s a woman coming down the ladder and one just getting off at the base. And there’s a firefighter trying to go up the ladder while these civilians are trying to get down. There’s only two firefighters there, and from what I can see, it’s a mess.

  It’s pretty clear that the second floor is full of people, that the fire’s about to flash over, and that we need six ladders, not one. Francher talks to the first person we see limping toward us. He’s African American and dressed pretty nice, except he doesn’t have any shoes. It turns out his ankle’s broken. Francher takes him to the triage area and I move ahead.

  I find two women on the hood of a car. The hood’s all bashed in. They’re kind of dazed, and there’s smoke oozing out the walls next to them. The first is heavyset and she’s got a broken tib-fib. I’m trying to figure out if I can carry her by myself, because, like I said, she’s heavyset. The other woman, I’m not sure what’s wrong with her. I do a scoop and run on the first one, picking her up like a kid, and just as I get her off the car I look up. There’s a firefighter in the window, and he’s dangling a woman out the window by one arm, and before I can say beans she lands on the roof of the same car. Boom! They’re throwing them out the windows! I’ve never seen anything like it.

  I yell up at him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  He yells back, “Clear some space. Get those people out of there!”

  About that time another engine company throws up a second ladder a couple of cars to the left of us, but there’s a shitload of flame coming out that window. I cart my first victim maybe thirty feet, set her down in the parking lot, and start ferrying the others out as fast as I can. They’re flying out the windows. Hitting the cars. And that first car is just getting more and more pancaked.

  We set up this relay. Me and Francher and some other firefighter whose name I never get. We transport the victims away from the building as fast as we can, most of them with broken legs, a few with no injuries except smoke inhalation. We’re moving as fast as we can so we won’t get hit by the next falling body. It’s like some game thought up by a maniac.

  After a while the bodies stop coming out of the dark so quickly, and then not much later they aren’t coming out at all. If the firefighter who’s been throwing people out gets out of there, I don’t see it. I don’t know what happens after that, because Francher and I both get drafted to help splint leg fractures. We have four broken femurs, one bleeding out pretty good. I think her blood pressure was something like eighty palp. Twenty-three broken legs, they told us later. Only a couple of people coming out of that window didn’t get hurt. But hell, better a broken leg than another funeral, wouldn’t you say? If they’d lined up inside that window and waited until the ladder was free, we would have lost another ten people, easy.

  Six hours later, when it’s winding down and we’re thinking about going inside to look for bodies, somebody notices all these shoes in the parking lot. More than two dozen shoes lying all over the place.

  In the middle of it all, Francher wears himself out and decides to have a heart attack. He’s a smoker, so the worst part for him is they wouldn’t let him have a fag in the hospital, you know. So later we go up there with a pack of Marlboros on the end of a fishing line with a pole and everything, and throw it into his room and reel it out into the hallway a few times. It was about the only fun we had out of the whole thing.

  10. KITTY TALKS AND TALKS AND…

  JAMIE ESTEVEZ>

  “What did Schmidt mean when he referred to the B and the C sides of the building?”

  “Wherever the command post is,” Trey said, “that becomes side A, which at the Z Club fire was the south side of the building. The other three sides are lettered in a clockwise direction from side A, so that Ladder Seven and Aid Fourteen started out on side B. C was in back on the north side, where the parking lot and alley were, and the doors where Engine Thirty-three stopped initially and began fighting fire was D, to the right of the command post. The designations all depend on where the command post is.”

  “So people were being dropped out the second-story window over the cars parked behind the building,” I said, pointing to the sketch he’d drawn earlier.

  “Right.”

  “And that was because there was only one ladder up in the back and all those people couldn’t have gotten down it quickly enough?”

  “Right.”

  “Why was there just the one ladder?”

  “The only other windows back there weren’t accessible because of the parked cars, and even if they had been, we didn’t have enough manpower early on to get them laddered and unshuttered. There were just the three of us in the beginning.”

  “Unshuttered?”

&n
bsp; “They were all boarded over except a second window that a woman had fallen out of.”

  Next we spoke to Brown’s crew, but after we’d concluded with Garrison and were almost finished with Kitty, they got an alarm and left us like a puff of dust. Clyde Garrison was a big man with a boyish haircut and a tuft of hair he constantly had to throw out of his eyes, a slight hunch in his back, and a twinkle in his eyes. He was a little taller than Trey. He gave a matter-of-fact rendition of the events on September third, delving into the details seemingly without emotion, though I noted that from time to time his voice cracked. He was the oldest firefighter we’d spoken to so far, in his early fifties, and had been driving Engine 28 the night of the Z Club fire.

  Garrison stated that Captain Brown had been assigned as C division, which put him in charge of the C side of the building, but had abandoned his post to climb a ladder and crawl inside the building. “I don’t think the division commander should be making rescues,” Garrison said, staring at Captain Brown. “I’ve told the captain before. It’s no secret. I told everybody who spoke to me after the fire. But that’s just my take on it. Maybe my nose is out of joint because he bumped me out of the way. Not that it does any good to be sore. I mean, in the end, he’s the captain and I’m just a driver. I could have made those rescues as easily as he did. He was basically just dropping people out the window.”

  “So you were the one throwing people out the window?” I asked Brown, somewhat astonished by the revelation. Why hadn’t he said so earlier? And why hadn’t the official report mentioned it?

  He gave me a look. “I wasn’t throwing them. I was lowering them and then dropping them. I would have walked them over to the escalator, but we didn’t have one.”

  “Okay, whatever. Is that why the department wanted to give you the award that you threw in their faces?”

  “I didn’t throw anything in anybody’s face. I didn’t want the whole ceremony thing. Okay?” Again, the look.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  Yikes.

  Tall, angular, and a whirlwind of constant motion, Kitty Acton was a different creature altogether from the slow-moving Clyde Garrison. Kitty was near tears at the beginning of her interview; then she teetered away from her emotions as she veered off topic and approached tears again when she returned to it. The upshot was they’d gone to C side and put up a ladder, and then the captain went up and began throwing—uh, lowering—people out of the smoke.

  She talked for almost an hour, backtracking willy-nilly, diverting her narrative off that night to other calls they’d been on, hogging the spotlight while she had it, a ballerina dancing on top of a music box. After Engine 28’s station bell hit and she ran out of the room to climb onto the fire engine, I turned to Brown. “Is she always like this, or is she just nervous?”

  “She’s always nervous.”

  “Hmm.” I took a deep breath. “Do you want to tell me your story while we’re waiting?”

  “Everything I have to say is already written down.”

  “Everything everybody has to say is already written down.”

  “I’d rather wait.”

  “Sure. Just one question, though. Clyde says you shouldn’t have left your post as Division C commander. That he could have handled the rescues as easily. What’s your response to that?”

  “When it started, there were only three of us back there. Me, Clyde, and Kitty. Kitty isn’t strong enough to yard anybody out of a window, and Clyde was moving like molasses. We only had a few minutes to act, and even as it was, we didn’t get them all out. I didn’t want to take a chance that somebody wouldn’t get out because Clyde wasn’t strong enough or was moving too slowly.”

  “And you knew you were strong enough?”

  “I know for a fact I got more people out than Clyde would have.”

  “He doesn’t want to acknowledge that, does he?”

  “Nope.”

  When Engine 28 hadn’t returned forty minutes later, I realized Kitty Acton’s testimonial had degraded into speculation and sidetracking anyway, along with all the trivia about her love life, which Brown told me she was in the habit of talking about endlessly. She tapped into the guys for dating advice, as if they were all her big brothers.

  “Oh, I guess I thought she was a lesbian for some reason.”

  “She is,” he said. “The dating advice thing can get kind of weird sometimes, like the time she was making out with Miss Ballard behind the station.” He grinned at me.

  So, I thought, Trey Brown has a lighter side after all. I grinned back.

  11. FOUR WEEKS EARLIER

  ANDREW WASHINGTON, SPURNED LOVER/ARSONIST>

  It takes me freakin’ forever to find two empty bottles. I finally snag a couple out of some old lady’s garbage with all the bacon drippings and shit—wiping them off on my pants—and then I can’t find no gasoline nowhere. I try a couple of garages for lawn mower equipment and shit, but I can’t get into the first two, and the third has a motherfriggin’ dog the size of a Seahawk barking his fool ass off at me and snapping at my kicks as I high-hurdle over one fence and then the next fence because there’s another motherfriggin’ dog in the next yard. Piss me off. Garages are out. Change of plan.

  As it happens, I take out my blade and custom cut some old grandma’s motherfriggin’ garden hose, slash me out a five-foot section, just about as long as my unit. Ha! Now that’s funny. That would make even Gerard laugh, if he got any laughs left after I finish with his sorry ass. Yeah. I got a five-foot unit—tuck it into my sock to keep it warm.

  With the bottle in my coat pocket and the hose all stuffed down my overalls, I walk past the club—twice, just to make sure they’re in there—after spotting Gerard’s little Honda parked a block away. Soon’s I see his car, I key the driver’s side door, writing “dumb nigga” on it.

  You can’t hear no music outside the club ’cause they got the walls soundproofed, but once I get in the stairs and the dumbster asks for money, I can hear the hip-hop and I know they’re dancin’, too. I think about Gerard and LaToya, and Gerard getting all up on her, and then I think about bustin’ past the dumbster and checking the place out, but he tells me on no account can I go up them stairs without a ticket. He’s just pissing me off, which is more bad news for LaToya and Gerard and any other cats hangin’ wid them. And this dumbster, too.

  So now I got me a couple bottles and I got me a hose, but I’m running around the whole business district of Columbia City looking for some way to fill the bottles with what my grandpop used to call Ethel. And I’m having no luck, and there are cats walking ’cause it’s a nice night, and a couple of cats give me a “ ’sup, bro?” but I keep on walkin’ ’cause I’m in a nasty mood and I gotta stay focused.

  I get out my screwdriver and find this Mustang maybe two blocks from the club, and I jimmy the gas flap, and once that’s off, the cap unspins and I put my face up in there and smell the gasoline. We used to sniff it, me and Gerard, in the hood, back when we was kids. Paint thinner, gas, lacquer, airplane glue, back when we still thought we was friends, huffing the night away listening to that fairy Michael Jackson and Prince and talkin’ about bitches, pimpin’ it up. Later Gerard gets this fat-ass job with City Light and thinks he’s hot shit ’cause he’s got some change in his pocket, the rest of us out here in the cold livin’ with our grandfolks and dodgin’ the po-lice. Nothin’ worse than a nigger thinks he’s better than all the other niggers. Gerard’s got his own crib and his own wheels and he walks around with that 9 millimeter under his driver’s seat like he’s a special bullshit motherfucker.

  So I put the hose into the Mustang’s gas tank, but the other end won’t fit in the bottle ’cause it’s like a small-dick bottle and it’s a big-dick hose. If you can believe this, I’m standing on the street maybe twenty minutes jackin’ off with this hose and finally some white cat comes by on a motherfriggin’ bicycle and yells something at me and keeps on pedaling like he knows what he’s talking about. This cat’s gone maybe a block when
I realize what he said. “You gotta suck on the end.” Like, I gotta suck on the end of the hose? No way I’m going to suck on this hose, I tell myself, and then the next thing I’m sucking gas and it’s in my mouth and I’m pouring it into the bottles, spilling it all over my kicks and my hands.

  I jam two bandannas down the necks of the bottles and carry them in the crook of my arm. It stinks worse than I remember. It’s warm out, but I’m wearing my big Raider coat, so that makes it easier to hide the bottles.

  They’re having some sort of beaner party on the first floor, a bunch of Mexican chiquitas running around in white dresses and shiny black shoes, Gerard and LaToya all up in the club on the second floor, where you can’t go unless you got a ticket. The first floor’s a big hall like a Mason lodge or something. There’s another set of doors on the front porch leading up to the club. You go in them double doors and go up this wide wooden stairway that creaks, and you turn the corner and go up another stairway just as wide. You wouldn’t even know the club was there unless somebody told you. They say Jimi used to play his white guitar there with the Rocking Kings back when he went to Garfield. There’s bullet holes in the walls from the FBI raid in the sixties when the Panthers was holdin’ meetings.

  I open the doors that lead upstairs, and the dumbster’s not in his usual position. My guess is, he had to take a piss. A car passes slowly, and for a minute I think it’s a cop, but it’s a couple checking the place out, going to go in, a man and his squeeze. They drive away and I pull the bottles out and go to light ’em. Only I forgot to bring a motherfriggin’ match. Can you believe that?

  I stand there with my bandannas stuffed down the bottles and my hands all cold from the gas, and I’m sick to my stomach that nothing I do tonight is going right. I wait any longer and the motherfriggin’ dumbster’s going to come down the stairs and I’m going to have to cap him. Then one of them Mexican kids comes out on the front porch and I look at the kid and say, “Hey, muchacho? You got a match?” He’s about seven, with his shirt all pulled out of his cords. He runs back in and comes out with a box of matches. Can you believe that?