by Earl Emerson
I’m pulling my face piece tight, hooking up the air, engaging the regulator, pulling my gloves on, walking toward a chain saw on the ground, jerking on the starter cord, jerking again. It fires up on the third yank just as somebody tugs on my shoulder from behind. I’m standing near the doorway now, and I can feel the heat through the turnouts.
“They’re dead!” somebody says. “Feel that heat. They’re dead.” Something deep in my gut tells me he’s right, that it’s too late, but that only makes me crazier.
As they try to pull me from the doorway, a radio transmission comes out of the building. It’s a woman’s voice. “King Command from Engine Twenty-eight. We’re running low on air. King Command?”
“You fuckers!” I say, and head through the doorway, where the entire top half is flame. I squat low and walk right through it, and as soon as I get inside, the heat decreases. And then my backside and the entire doorway is showered in water as a hose stream hits my butt, and I feel the cooling effect, my back pounded by the hose stream, my front half baking.
I cannot see shit, and I don’t know where I’m going, because I can barely remember the directions that were given over the air. That’s when I hear the banging. Somebody’s banging rhythmically on a wall. I follow the sound. Behind me, two crews creep along with hose lines flowing, water splattering the ceiling high above us, bouncing off the walls, splashing across my back. They’re not putting out the fire, which is in the attic space above us, but they are cooling things a little.
I find the spot where the banging is coming from, next to a door, knock the safety brake off the chain saw with my wrist, and rev up the saw, a Stihl twenty-inch, with carbide tips on the chain for cutting through just about anything. With the nose of the chain saw, I touch the door and a shower of sparks shoots into my face. The door is metal. I move to the right and begin working. It takes ten seconds of pushing just to get the blade through the wall.
It’s heavy sledding, but I’m not going to give up. Trey’s on the other side of this wall. Trey and his partner. He’s maybe two feet from me, and it’s going to be something short of ridiculous if I can’t get him out. The whirring motor shrieks, and I bury the blade and fight the contortions of the saw, the muscles in my arms and shoulders twitching with the effort. I feel sweat run down my spine.
From time to time sparks shoot off the chain. Three cuts, I figure. One across the top. One down the right side. One down the left side. Maybe another at the bottom. Then we kick it out. Damn, this is hard work. I know these guys want to spell me, but there’s no way I’m letting these chickenshit motherfuckers take hold of this saw. They had their go.
And then the saw begins choking and shuts down. I pull it out of the wall, pull the cord and rev it up to get the rpms where they should be, but still, it keeps choking. Like us, any internal combustion engine requires oxygen to function, and like us, deprived of oxygen, it begins to misbehave.
65. TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE
TREY>
Over Kitty’s radio, we listen as the dispatcher informs King Command he has firefighters trapped inside the building.
I tell Kitty to check her gear and make certain no skin is exposed, and then I do as much myself. It is best to make these checks with gloves off, but when I touch my helmet, my bare fingers recoil from the hot plastic, so I put my gloves back on. Chatty Kathy is strangely silent. She thinks we’re going to die. And she’s wondering how the hell she ever got herself into a job where you can be cooked to death inside a layered Nomex suit—tall, slim Kitty Acton, who before joining the fire department wanted to be a veterinarian.
The airwaves are crackling. “Dispatch from King Command. Our RIT team is making entry.” Moments later we actually hear firefighters through the thick wall behind us. I can feel movement through the bottle on my back, which is snug against the wall, can feel the vibrations of people moving. And then it is quiet for a long time, perhaps ninety seconds, maybe two minutes. Certainly long enough to cook to death.
“Dispatch from King Command. Our RIT team has been forced out of the building. Repeat. Our RIT team has been forced out of the building because of high heat. We’re trying to cool the area now.”
“Geez, they left,” Kitty says.
“They’ll be back.”
“Dispatch from King Command. We’re not going to be able to access this building from the front. We’re going to look for another entrance.”
“Jesus,” said Kitty. “They’re not coming back.”
“Hold your horses. It’s going to be all right.”
But it isn’t going to be all right, and we both know it. Radio traffic has died down. It is rare to have zero fire traffic at a working fire, but that’s what we are experiencing. Is it possible they are simply standing out there waiting for us to burn to death? If so, they won’t have a long wait. I can hear Kitty burrowing into the debris looking for a cooler place, squirming down like a rat. It is getting hot enough that I pick up a piece of the ceiling board and prop it up to shield me from the radiant heat boring down on us from the fire above our heads. After a while the shield bursts into flame, and I toss it aside.
“Why can’t they get us out?” Kitty asks despairingly. I do not reply. I am thinking this is the end. This is how it’s going to end.
We all wonder at some point in our lives how we’re going to finish. Unless we have a terminal illness or are sitting on death row, it is an enigma for most. Tonight I can verify how and when I am going to die. I’m going to heat up and lose consciousness and eventually burn to death in a smoked-up room beside a firefighter I’ve worked with for five years and can barely tolerate. It is remarkable to me that I am no more panicked than if I were sitting in the dentist’s office waiting for an appointment. Maybe that’s because there’s nothing I can do about any of this.
There will be a whole lot of people at the funeral. Johnny will cry. My mother will handle it with the same stoicism with which she’s handled all the bad luck in her life. Jesus will be her savior. There will be a massive department-orchestrated funeral, and our caskets will be lushly filmed for the news. They will remember that I was the hero at the Z Club and marvel that I could be dead a month later. People will give long, rambling speeches recalling trivia about my life that I don’t even remember. The mayor will give a speech over my casket and tell the crowds he loved me like a brother.
There is a rattling, and something attacks the steel door, banging against it. After a moment, I decide it’s a chain saw. The noise goes away. Then the wall directly behind me begins to vibrate. Moments later a chain saw blade pops through the wall.
“Goddamn,” says Kitty. “You gotta love ’em.”
The chain saw is high and to my left, working across the wall above me. Then the horizontal cut is ended and the saw is withdrawn. They begin another cut, this one vertically about four feet to my right, coming down the wall, the blade poking through on our side. Don’t they know when you’re cutting through a wall you don’t bury the blade? You go by feel, and when the blade has barely breached the wall you hold it there. That is the procedure. Whoever is working that chain saw is working wild.
The vertical cut four feet to my right takes longer than did the horizontal one over my head. Perhaps the chain is becoming dulled. It isn’t until the first downward vertical cut is almost complete that I try to recall exactly where the horizontal cut above my head began, because it is beginning to occur to me that the next downward vertical cut will be along my spine.
I’m jammed up against the wall and they’re preparing to cut me in half lengthwise.
I push the send button on my portable radio and say, “Engine Twenty-eight to RIT team. Don’t bury the saw so deep. I’m trapped against the wall opposite where you’re cutting.”
I wait a few moments, but there is no reply. The saw finishes its cut to my right, and a moment later it bulges through the wall directly over my head, showering sawdust over me. At the depth he’s burying the blade, it will rip through my bunking coa
t. It will slice my helmet. It will open my back in a way that will probably kill me. I arch and look up, using the flashlight on my helmet, directing the beam so that I might know whether the blade is going to come down with surgical precision or gross imprecision. Someone’s got it poised directly over my spine.
“Kitty!” I shout. “You gotta jam the saw! It’s coming right at me.”
As she begins to stir, the saw blade crawls down the wall toward me, three feet away, two and a half, two…with a grinding sound…“Engine Twenty-eight to command. The saw is too deep. You have to stop the saw.”
No reply. I repeat my message as the saw blade moves toward me. To her credit, Kitty hits the wall hard. I don’t know what the article is, but she holds it flat against the wall, and then the chain saw blade whips through it like a hot knife through butter. “God damn!” she says, scrabbling for another object to block the blade.
But it’s too late. The blade nicks my helmet and specks fly off, then it passes my neck and I cringe. It spins and whirs on my composite air bottle and jams. The blade is stuck in the wall for a moment and then they pull it out. I whack the wall five times in succession, desperately trying to send a message.
When the dispatcher calls on my radio, I realize why I haven’t contacted the fire crews. I’ve been on channel 16. Everybody else is on channel 1, the fire ground channel. The dispatcher says, “Engine Twenty-eight. Your message was garbled. Repeat.”
“The saw they’re using is going to cut me,” I say as calmly as possible. Kitty is straddling me now, standing over me with a chunk of something else she’s found in the rubble, her bunking trousers crotch in my face. “Tell the rescue crews they have to move the cut.”
“Okay, Engine Twenty-eight. We’ll relay the message.”
When the saw starts up again and pokes through the wall, we can hear the dispatcher’s warning on Kitty’s radio, but it occurs to me that it will be impossible to pick up on the other side of the wall because of the roaring chain saw. The saw has been moved over a few inches, and I struggle to try to reposition myself so it will come down on the bottle again, but I cannot move. They’re going to gut me from behind.
The saw moves faster this time, and I tell Kitty not to let the chain take a chunk out of her. Even as I’m speaking the blade cuts through whatever piece of junk she’s jammed against the wall, and she falls backward in front of me, landing on the beam across my lap. It hurts, but it doesn’t hurt as much as the chain saw blade when it zippers alongside my air bottle and shreds my bunking coat and goes deep enough so that I can actually feel the revolving steel in my back. I vow not to scream, but even before I complete the silent vow I begin screaming.
In the movies people pass out when they feel this much pain, but the blade rips into my flesh and continues down as if I’m just another layer of wallpaper, and no matter how badly I want to, I do not pass out. And then the blade is done, and they’re hacking at the wall with axes, and moments later the heat lifts as I fall backward into the corridor with a large chunk of the wall. The idling chain saw on the floor is next to my head.
I watch Kitty being led to safety, and then they’re lifting the beam off my legs and dragging me faceup, racing to the entranceway, and for a few seconds it’s hotter than it was inside the room, and then we’re in the parking lot and they’ve set me down. My legs are numb and my back is bleeding. My torn bunking coat is bright with blood.
I lay motionless in a tangle of gear and wait for them to realize I’m seriously injured. And then they’re cutting my turnout clothing and mask backpack off with scissors and buck knives. There are five or six people working on me, and when my back is exposed to the evening air, one of the medics says, “Sweet Jesus. Get him on a backboard quick.”
They roll me onto my side and lift me onto a backboard and into the back of the medic unit, the same basic procedure I’ve done with hundreds of patients myself.
Sitting beside me is my friend Rumble, blubbering and confessing that he was the man on the saw. A firefighter is taking my blood pressure while one medic puts an IV into my left arm. The other medic is behind me, and I can feel gentle pressure as he pushes 4x4s against my wounds. I do not ask how badly I am hurt. I can tell from the ministrations of the medic team that they are in a panic. If nothing else, I’ve lost an enormous quantity of blood. I can barely stay awake. Before I know it, we are headed to Harborview Hospital, a firefighter driving, the two medics remaining in back trying to keep me alive. Rumble to one side, his teary eyes huge with guilt and grief. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt this much pain.
“Don’t worry about it. You saved my life.”
“Geez, Trey. I can’t believe I did that. I’m so goddamn sorry.”
From what I can feel along my back, the wound is twelve or thirteen inches long and runs from my scapula to a spot near my hip. To say it hurts is an infinite irony. It is the worst pain I’ve felt in my life. Every breath is agony. I’m getting weaker by the minute. Can feel myself begin to nod off.
“Don’t leave us, Trey,” Rumble says. “Whatever you do, don’t leave us.”
I drift off.
66. THE MAYOR TALKS HIMSELF OUT OF A JOB
JAMIE ESTEVEZ>
The waitstaff, male and female, was decked out in white tuxedo-style shirts and black tuxedo pants as they served between two and three hundred people gathered in the lower level of the Space Needle, 100 feet above the ground.
Stone Carmichael had chosen to build his public persona on events that in most families would remain private, sacrificing intimate moments for the greater glory of the family name. The room was full of the Carmichael family and friends. Kendra and her husband spoke to me briefly, and it was from Kendra that I gleaned that the anniversary celebration was a sham, that the Carmichael marriage was on the rocks, and that Carmichael had somehow coerced his estranged wife into participating. I couldn’t help thinking Trey had something to do with their marriage going south, and the thought made my blood boil. We’d been getting along better lately, but he could still make me fume. I visited with Echo Armstrong, who was concerned that her husband was consuming liquor as quickly as he could locate it. The old man was there, too, Shelby Carmichael, who busied himself pestering a red-headed camerawoman working for the local ABC affiliate. I noticed Shelby’s nurse following him at a discreet distance, as if he might keel over without warning. Every major city functionary I’d ever met was in the room. A half hour into it, Harlan Overby made an entrance. In his late sixties, he looked trim and fit, his silver hair slicked back, his suit tailored perfectly.
True to Carmichael’s habits, the evening was preplanned, printed programs on rice paper available at the door. From seven until eight, there would be a cocktail hour with hors d’oeuvres. At eight: speeches, cake, music, and dancing. At eight forty-five, there would be an announcement. In a corner near the elevator, I’d glimpsed boxes of banners and buttons: “Carmichael for Governor.”
Thankfully, eight o’clock came and the celebratory speeches about the Carmichael marriage were offered, toasts were proffered, cake was sliced and passed out. The lights were dimmed while Stone and India danced a spotlight dance in front of hundreds of admirers—you couldn’t even tell they didn’t like each other. Stone Carmichael was probably the most popular Seattle mayor in thirty years. You would have to say—if you didn’t know he was a crook or that India had been having a fling with a captain in the fire department and was leaving him—that they were perfect together. She wore a black off-the-shoulder floor-length dress, her pale hair long and loose. Stone had doffed his spectacles and had the half-blind look habitual glasses wearers get without them. The only snag that came remotely close to spoiling the picture was that India was half a head taller; I noticed she didn’t kick off her heels to lessen the discrepancy in height. After their solo dance, the lights brightened and the dance floor began filling up. Around the outskirts chitchat started up again.
I was headed for the restroom when I saw Trey Brown and another Afri
can-American male arguing angrily with the security guys. The man accompanying Trey was shouting, but the music was so loud I could barely hear. Finally he flipped some identification out and they were allowed into the party.
Trey wore fire department trousers with a shabby white cotton coat that I learned later had been lifted from the hospital. He had white cream on his ears, probably Silvadine, the common medication for burns. So did his partner. When Trey saw me, he stopped and introduced Rumble. The two of them looked as if they’d just gotten home from a long road trip, or just crawled out of a fire.
“You know about the tape, right?” Trey’s friend said.
“The what?”
“This. This right here,” he said, pulling a small tape cassette recorder from a pocket in his fire department coat. “His honor on the phone?”
“Rumble has a hard time keeping a secret,” Trey said, wandering off through the crowd.
“What?” his friend shouted to Trey’s backside. “I can keep a secret. It was your idea to do this. You’re the one who’s mad.” My eyes followed Trey as he moved through the crowd. There was something wrong with the way he was moving.
“What’s he mad about?” I asked.
“He thinks they tried to kill him.”
I knew from conversations with Trey that Rumble was his best friend and had been ever since they came into the department together. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be at work? Isn’t Trey’s shift working today?”
“We were at work,” Rumble said. “Now we’re here. Hey. You got any idea where the sound techies are hiding out?”
Not much later, while the police and fire chiefs and their wives were socializing near the windows on the west side of the room, somebody came in and handed a message to the fire chief, who in turn rushed the note to Stone Carmichael, who was about to mount the stage for the evening’s centerpiece speech. The speaker of the state House of Representatives had halted the dancing and was giving a short talk, working up to the evening’s announcement, I presumed, while Stone conferred with the fire chief.
