Burning Down the House (12 page)

You come down off a roof like that really fast. We didn't stop to lower the axe and the big saw by rope first, just passed them from hand to hand, hugging our chests in close to the ladder to try to keep our balance. Down below, there were already flames boiling out of the windows, dark orange and sooty as if they weren't getting enough air, and there were flames starting at the eaves too, the little yellow candle-wick flames that you can sweep the hose over only to have them pop right up again, burning gas forced out through cracks by the fire below.

It was beginning to look like a building we'd lose altogether; the only thing on our side was that the upstairs apartment was empty. We'd taken a turn through it early in the fire, but there was nothing in the place except for light smoke and a big old rectangular microwave. Fire was coming up through the bedroom floor in the back corner, but it was half-hearted, with most of the heat from the burning room below going straight up through the hollows in the walls.

It took hours to knock that fire down, hours more to make sure it was finally out. We had managed to haul out the toolboxes and the compressed gas cylinders, trying to salvage anything we could from the darkened building, which would end up being a complete writeoff.

Afterwards, picking through the pieces, we learned a lot. We could have gone in through the big garage doors, but there was no sign that there was a connecting doorway, and we didn't want firefighters in with the acetylene tanks and the pits under the lifts. There could have been waste oil in drums, high-pressure oxygen, and we didn't want to push anyone into a more dangerous spot. As with most things, in retrospect, there might have been a better way.

The next morning, the fire investigators were there, and the chief and I went back in with them, our fire coats still dirty and smelling like kippers. Inside the big standing coolers, all of the pop bottles were intact, at least as far as the level of the liquids inside. Above the surface of the pop, every single plastic bottleneck had melted, and every single bottle top had turned, like a flower on a stalk seeking out the sun. Every snack bag had burst and then melted its thin plastic onto the potato chips inside, so they resembled some mysteriously shrivelled astronaut food. Everything in the front of the store was coated with a thick, tarry yellow covering of condensed fire gases, sticky to the touch, the sunlight coming in the windows a different shade than my eyes expected, like evening light angling down through big-city pollution.

Even now I can reach out and touch the bottles in a store that isn't there anymore, and feel how tacky the condensed smoke makes them feel. That sensation is stronger than anything I remember away from the fireground, away from firefighting, as if every emergency call were drawn with much darker pencils, so that the other parts of my memory don't seem to count.

The arson investigators walked straight down the hall to the back storeroom, crossing in a few strides a piece of real estate we'd tried over and over again to make our way through the night before. In the back, where the rooms were completely charred black, a stock of light bulbs on metal shelves had burned clear out of their packages, glass bells deformed and bulging out in different directions like some kind of light bulb freak show. The investigators were looking for what had caused the fire, and they eventually found where it had started, in the narrow back hall near the floor, though they couldn't determine why.

It was just one more spot on a map that would get more crowded every single day.

More roads followed, my personal map coloured in bit by bit, call by call. Bennett's Road, where a small red car rolled upside down into a deep ditch full of shattered ice and muddy water, and we were in the ditch feeling around for the driver for too long, our own bodies starting to freeze, when a passerby told us she was up the driveway in a neighbour's house, sitting naked in a bathtub of hot water to warm up, waiting for the ambulance.

Indian Meal Line, because people will snowmobile without helmets, and sometimes they get thrown so hard that their boots come off as their head gets driven into a pile of rocks. King's Road, where I knew that an idling school bus hemmed in by snowdrifts had filled a light blue house with diesel exhaust, killing one person immediately and leaving another in serious condition.

Beachy Cove Road again, where an old orange van had crashed after racing back and forth along a coastal road at night with no headlights. There was no driver, only a trail of blood drops and a bloody handprint on the front door of a house. The woman inside stridently told the police that her son wasn't home, and that no, they couldn't come in.

I looked down and there were the driver's tools, lots of tools, shiny in the lights and spread all over the road. Somebody should have been picking them up, because they were someone's livelihood, but they lay on the pavement instead, bright and flashing like a broken skeleton of dismembered silver bones, because the police were frustrated and angry and making a point. And no one's supposed to mess with evidence.

At the beginning of a call you always have too little information, and afterwards it's like you always have too much.

It wasn't only the map: there was also the fact that I kept feeling as though I was always ripping someone off, that I was doing so much that I didn't have time to do anything right. Later, I would feel as if stealing time from my family: in the beginning in St. Philip's, I felt like I was stealing time from either the fire department, from Barby, or from my job. It was like no one was ever satisfied.

And my job itself didn't make anything easier: as a local CBC television news reporter—something I wound up doing for five years, I would go to work never knowing when I would be coming home, or what I would be doing. Once I spent our anniversary watching water bombers swoop in over two different forest fires, and didn't end up getting home until midnight. Another assignment, handed to me just minutes after the executive producer told me I could expect to be laid off because of budget cuts, saw my cameraman and I sent an hour and a half out of the city to Placentia to the scene of an axe murder. And even at work I was experiencing a kind of bizarre disconnect with reality: once at the scene, the RCMP invited us under the crime scene tape, and my cameraman shot videotape of the axe handle and the bloody sheet covering the victim while the police on the scene made small talk and waited for a crime scene team to come out from St. John's.

I'm not sure, in the end, if anyone else actually noticed—hearing about a fuel truck roll-over in an early-season snowstormon Tucker's Hill, I'd get out of work early and speed to the scene, wondering every inch of the way if leaving would end up affecting my job.

At an early-morning accident scene, I'd ask someone else to take over as scene commander and wait for the tow truck so I could get cleaned up and ready for work. I could never escape the look of disappointment I'd get from Barby when the pager went off in the middle of a social event—so that everywhere, I always felt I was in the midst of letting someone else down. It seemed so unfair to be trying so hard to help people, and to be failing someone every single step of the way. Strangely, it felt as if I was putting myself first and taking advantage—and that it was slowly eating away at the fabric of the rest of my life. And maybe that was true.

After falling out of firefighting, I know exactly how I fell back in, even though I knew from experience that I would see every single scrap of road I drove lose its innocence. I'm still not surprised I joined up again, even though I'm sure now that it was exactly the wrong choice for me to make.

You just don't get to feel that way in normal, everyday life—you don't get to completely fill up with emotion so that it piles out of your chest and runs down your arms like electricity, all of your senses becoming signal flares. You don't get to see parts of the world that are completely wrong, totally out of place, but somehow so much more believable than if they were in their proper places.

I would end up limp and exhausted, as if all of my senses had been played like guitar strings, as if something incredibly important had swept right through me, ball lightning had run through me, dripped off my fingertips and drained away.

Why did I start again? More to the point—why did I ever think I could stop?

We had a call for the smell of smoke in a house, and we got there to find a teenaged girl and her brother out on the driveway in shorts in the November cold, and down in the basement the sickly smell of burned furnace oil, a smoke detector pealing away at the top of the stairs. It turned out that the furnace manifold had cracked, and that smoke— and carbon monoxide—was leaking into the basement.

I was trained to watch for a bunch of things with carbon monoxide poisoning. Bright red cheeks are a trademark, the sign that carbon monoxide is replacing oxygen in the victim's blood. “Breaking the oxyhemoglobin link” is the way it's described in textbooks, but it seems more insidious than that: carbon monoxide attaches itself instead of oxygen to red blood cells and then, like a bully, just won't let go. So someone can appear healthy, except for the headaches. And the confusion. The sleepiness or weakness in the extremities. Sometimes the symptoms go on for days or even weeks, like a low-grade flu that no one in the family can seem to shake.

This teenaged girl had the right colour, the right kind of red high on her cheekbones, and I told her she'd done the right thing to get her brother out of the house. The colour might have been from the excitement, though, so I was watching for other symptoms, trying to see if we needed to send her for medical treatment.

She was hanging on my arm. “The turtles. You have to save the turtles,” she said, her eyes big and staring.

Then I started thinking maybe we would need an ambulance after all.

But down in the basement, when we had opened all the windows, we came across a child's swimming pool on the floor, half full of water, and in it were several turtles swimming around in lazy circles, goggling up at us. All of them turned out to be fine.

There were just six houses on that cul-de-sac, and a month later the one right on the end burned, and we pulled hoses in over hip-high snowbanks, leaving a pattern that suggested snakes had swum across the surface of the snow.

Two for six in thirty-five days. So much for the law of averages.

ELEVEN

I can be woken up in the middle of a thousand different nights and always feel the same way—crowbarred out of sleep, ripped upright, like I've left my stomach somewhere slightly behind. Sometimes I'd be completely disoriented, lost and without landmarks in what should have been a familiar room.

I've stood by the bed, swearing blindly at my pager—once, staring right at it and yelling “What the fuck is that?”—unable to figure out what was making all the noise.

Other times you wake up immediately, feeling as if your mind is as clean and sharp as cut glass. That's when you suddenly believe that the best of all impractical discoveries are made in that slice of midnight wonder, because every single thing is distinct, finite in definition, beautiful in a way it never will be again. You have that fleeting perfect instant, that moment of understanding just how everything became the way it is. You see things in ways you've never seen them before. Something as simple as a wooden box sitting on a bureau can take on an individual magic, as if you're the first person who has ever seen it—at least the first person who has ever seen it in terms of line and shape and purpose.

Even with the shock of being jarred awake, I always liked the night fire calls best. There is a kind of surreal nature about them that makes them both easier to accept and easier to try to divorce from real life. There's so much that's unworldly that it at least lets you put a sharp, dark line between the calls and everything else— the world you'll wake up in come morning, if you're lucky enough to sleep.

It's difficult to explain. Perhaps it's because, cast against the dark and in the absence of most familiar clues, it's easier to accept the unbelievable—that a man, thrown from a snowmobile without a helmet, could be sitting on the bumper of your fire truck and talking to you, even though there is a hole in his head the size of a tennis ball and you can see through that window the wrinkled tissue of his brain as easily as if you were taking apart a plastic anatomical figure.

It's far easier, too, to accept the dazzling swirl of emergency lights and the puffs of steam that burst out of everyone's mouth like the balloons that spring from cartoon characters, great white clouds caught in the lights that look as though they should hold every spoken word in bold black capital letters.

It also makes it easy for those characters to come back at you in nightmares.

It was two in the morning, and the pager went off in that deep-down time when it takes ages to drag myself out of the thick black wool of sleep. By then, in the mid-nineties, nighttime fire calls were a regular ritual for me. As deputy chief, whenever the pager went off I'd head first to my small office upstairs, where the department radio was set up, listen to the details of the call and confirm to the 911 operator that we were responding.

This call was for an MVA—emergency dispatch shorthand for a motor vehicle accident—on St. Thomas Line, a narrow road that threaded its way along the top of cliffs above Newfoundland's Con-ception Bay. We didn't usually get to know more than that. An MVA could be anything from a car off the road to a head-on collision, from the simple incongruity of looking at the rusted underside of an inverted Hyundai to seeing the complete destruction of two or more vehicles, metal ripped, glass and plastic shattered, cars torn into pieces and strewn around as if there had been an explosion, not an accident.

After I called in, it was back to the bedroom, heading for the closet where I left everything in order every single night—socks on the top of the pile, then a shirt, then pants. I'd always leave the keys in the same pocket: it's too easy to lock yourself out, and everyone else is used to falling right back to sleep, so there's no one to let you back in.