Burning Down the House (13 page)

When I stepped outside, it was as if the night was holding its breath.

I'm sure you can smell things more clearly at night—the sharp sap of the spruce hedge on the driveway, for example, or the damp breath of springtime and rot. It's as though, in the absence of the visual, other senses become more acute. In summer, lupins and foxglove and fireweed. Passing them, even driving fast in the truck, I could easily recognize the fingerprint of their scent even if I couldn't identify exactly which flower I was smelling. Heather and blueberry and rhodora exhale cooling perfumes as distinct as the smells of different kinds of smoke; chimney fires have their own tang, just as house fires have a garbage-dump smell that's instantly recognizable, the by-product of burning wood and tar and shingles and plastic.

That night it was late fall and the metal-wet smell of cold ground, and I could feel my heart beating in my ears, the swooshing thump of it. I tried to keep my breathing even and slow.

There was a full moon, and it was cold for the first time in the season. I can't remember the exact date, probably in late October, but I recall thinking that it was the kind of cold that signals winter has finally arrived. I put on my bunker pants while I was standing next to my truck, and placed the red light on my dashboard—no siren, because there were no other cars on the road, no one to warn. And I was shivering.

Get blasted out of sleep and it catches up with you on the drive. A deep shivering starts, one that clatters your teeth and wavers in your chest far out of proportion to how cold it actually is. It thrums there, like something around your heart is rattling, juddering like a twitching muscle gone mad. I think of it as something perilously close to shock—partially a defence mechanism, a reaction to being awakened suddenly, and partially sheer apprehension about whatever it is you're going to see next.

Every time I go to a scene I add another few frames to the world of possibilities I might face next time: Flail-chest, where all the ribs are broken on one side and the victim is desperately trying to breathe, the tinker-toy construction of the chest all broken apart so that the air can't effectively be pulled into the lungs anymore. Big bleeders, the ones where I'd feel I was mucking around in ochre soup, trying to find a cut artery like it's some sort of live and spraying rubbery noodle—feeling around for something I neither can see nor really want to think about, all the while knowing that time is collapsing with the urgency of having to find the artery before my patient runs out of blood to pump. Metal driven into or through things, so I sometimes have to stare at the plain impossibility of it all.

I was trying to imagine what kind of accident it would be, running through the checklist, and I already knew by then that I would be the first person there. I knew that by the way the trucks were pulling out of the stations, keying up their microphones and heading out on the road. I was thinking about where my first aid equipment was—two pairs of rubber gloves in my fire jacket pocket, another pair in the CPR mask in the glove compartment. Going through the first things I did at every scene: look for arterial bleeding, check for breathing, watch their eyes and talk to their fears. That would be it until the rescue truck came, three or four minutes after I got there. No blankets, no medical gear, no second opinions— I'd decide and act, or nothing would happen. Not deciding is every bit as bad as making the wrong decision. Dither, and time just runs out. It doesn't seem like much time, three or four minutes, but it can feel like ages.

When I was by myself, I'd sometimes end up watching people die in just that amount of time, in just a few minutes, while I'd work their chest with frustration and desperation and even anger. I would be breathing for them, into them, even as I watched the familiar signs that they were moving from being a living person to being as slight and ephemeral as someone else's memories.

Coming around a corner, I saw it was a single vehicle, standing square on its wheels but blasted up into the middle of someone's front yard. It appeared that the road had gone left and then into the straightaway but the van had stubbornly kept following the line of the curve. Slowing down, I could see the skid down through the snow into the loose gravel, could see where the van had flown through the air and through two telephone poles before touching down again in the front yard of a brown and white house.

Even though it was the middle of the night, the people who lived in the house were out in front looking at the van, a loose semicircle of concerned faces peering towards the vehicle—but not touching it, well away from it, in fact, everyone's eyes on the dangling electrical wires above the vehicle.

The driver was slumped against the window. I could see the white of the side of his face pressed flat against the glass. I left my truck out on the shoulder, turned sideways so that the other trucks would see the flashing light in the windshield and know where to stop. Then I took my bunker coat out from behind the front seat and started walking towards the wrecked van.

It was rattling with noise, the kind of noise that makes you think the windows should be bulging outwards with each bass stroke. The engine had shut down, the sliding door was sprung open a crack, the sheet metal of the roof kinked downwards. But the radio was cranked loud, so the key was still turned in the ignition, and there was rock music—lonesome guitar and deep bass and Neil Young— booming inside. The rest of the scene was fixed like a still life; the only thing moving was me.

The bystanders from the house were still looking at the van, at the driver in a mound against the door, no sign yet whether he was alive or dead. I had to check first for a lot of things: was the van going to move on me, or had it stopped for good? If the pumper had been there, I could have thrown chocks under the van's wheels. The engine of the van wasn't running, had probably stopped when it hit the first telephone pole. It didn't look like it was going anywhere, and it didn't look like the wires were going to come any closer to the roof.

Two separate telephone poles had been broken by the van, chunks taken right out of their middles, leaving the tops of the poles hanging loose from the wires. I had to look carefully at the wires. One was a feeder line for a long rural neighbourhood—big, big voltage—but I saw the cables weren't touching the roof.

So I was following the rules. I did my scene survey, moved around the van, and the whole time I had to hold back the urge to run up to the window to see how the driver was. That kind of recklessness gets trained out of your system fast, because it can kill.

When the gloves snap around my wrists, I can always smell them. The air around me fills up with them, even outside in wind and rain. It's almost Pavlovian—maybe I'd smell them because I was expecting to. The powder, the odour of the thin membranes themselves— the airlessness of them makes me think of suffocating, makes my breath catch in my throat. It's a smell that clings to you long after you've peeled the thin, stretchy skin off and washed your hands over and over again.

I walked all the way around the van, and still there were no other firefighters, so with no more chance to wait I opened the sliding door and climbed in and checked the ABCs—airway, breathing and circulation. The driver was breathing, and there wasn't any obvious bleeding. The music was still pounding, but by then I was supporting his neck with both my hands—no hand free to turn the noise off.

The van was the usual mess inside, everything strewn as if absentmindedly flung around. I could see the force of the accident, could see how much the van's heavy frame had flexed from the forces of the crash: three goalie sticks lay flat on the floor under the middle seats, and all three had broken when the floor humped up. In the front seat, the driver was semi-conscious and mumbling, still caught in his seat belt.

Distilled, almost staged chaos. And that's the way it often is in a wreck.

When I was fourteen, I was with my dad in a Volkswagen van full of camping equipment that rolled off the road in an early winter Nova Scotia storm. We were up past Truro, heading for New Brunswick through the Folly Lake pass. One minute there was no snow, the next even the wheel tracks of the cars in front of us were gone, filled in with heavy, wet, early winter snow that pounded down quickly into hard white ice under our wheels.

If you've got experience driving, it's a moment that makes your stomach tighten, because you can feel the change under the tires, that skittery looseness that tells you things have changed—a lot. At fourteen I didn't have that knowledge yet, and the snow was just a slowing inconvenience in what was already supposed to be several long hours on the road.

I was looking out the side window at the battering snow when I heard Dad tell me to “Hold on, Russ,” and I did, and then the van cut hard across traffic and I could see a big snowplow lumbering the other way, straight at us, and still the tires refused to bite. Then the Volkswagen was rolling down the embankment before the nose dug in and we were pitchpoling end over end.

My clearest memory of the whole accident is of one brief, bright moment, upside down and seeing the flash of white clouds through the side windows, while at the same time watching everything in the van caught momentarily in motion—a sledgehammer and wood-splitting wedges, highway flares, a bowsaw, plastic bowls and wooden box lids. They all seemed to hold, stuck in space for a moment, before the van did its dizzying last spin and fell into the ditch on its roof, and everything in the air decided to obey gravity once again.

With that final crash, the Volkswagen filled with noise, and then just as suddenly all of the sound stopped.

High up over the big steering wheel, my dad, his beard less grey then, had ridden the Volkswagen stoically into the ditch, breaking ribs and his shoulder blade, smacking his face hard off the inside of the windshield. Later, one whole side of his face turned purple, devolving through yellow-bruised maps until finally it became my dad's face again.

After they released us from the Truro hospital, Dad was making very little sense beyond the fact that we had to get to a bathroom. I had to find our way home by myself. I was carrying his wallet and keys, and I bought the bus tickets and later paid for the taxi home from the bus station. I'm pretty sure the cab driver ripped us off, because we drove the whole way from the bus station to the south end of Halifax with another passenger in the front seat, someone who didn't seem to be paying anything, and with the meter off.

I always imagine, when I think about that bus trip, that we drove home right through what would later become my first fire district. The fact is that we were on another highway far from Wolfville, but it seems that my mind wants to put all my accident memories in the same handy places.

It was the first time my dad had ever told me he needed my help. After the crash I had to find his glasses, even though they were simply perched on his forehead, and he relied on me to get us home. I still remember staring out the front windows of the bus, the road wet and shiny, keeping in mind the family rule not to phone home until there was something concrete to say, not to worry anyone until everything was clear, until everyone's condition was known. How many times did I talk on the phone to one or the other of my parents, trying to divine what was really going on through the caution of their trying not to say too much?

I recall hearing the big bus tires whirring on the pavement and wondering whether the bus would crash too.

For a couple of weeks after that, Dad slept restless in his big chair downstairs—sitting up made it easier to breathe without pain—and I spent equally restless nights in my bedroom, lucky enough only to have torn some muscles in my shoulder. If he worried about the crash or dreamed about it, it's certainly nothing he would ever tell me.

My mother would come in when she heard me thrashing and moaning and crying, caught up in my crash nightmares. She was convinced I was having dreams about the accident, and she asked me if I remembered anything about them, while she stood silhouetted there against the bright, long backlit hall. I knew even then that her mouth would be thin and serious, as if she was calculating what kind of medical treatment might be in the offing and where that treatment might be found.

So I lied and told her I didn't remember anything about them at all. Dreams? What dreams? You get better at lying all the time—it becomes a little smoother with every spoken sentence. “No problem— just couldn't sleep.”

And it's liar, liar, pants on fire. Don't think that rhyme hasn't occurred to me before.

I sat in the van on St. Thomas Line, still holding the driver's head, listening to one song end, another begin, and the pumper came silently up the road in front of me, ghosting forward without the siren, lighting up the night with red and white flashers, followed first by our rescue truck and then by the ambulance with the paramedics.

Inside the van, it was oddly like being part of a movie of a crash. The noise of the radio covered up all other sounds, and while I could see the other firefighters' mouths opening and closing, their arms pointing at the wire and the van, I heard nothing.

A firefighter came around to the open side of the van, stood at a safe distance and shouted in through the door, “You okay?”

I nodded and shouted back that I was.

“He stable?”

“I think so,” I answered.

“Fine, then. Not going to move anything else till the power company gets here.”

I became aware of the warmth of the man whose head I was holding. When you're the first one in, you support the victim's head so that it can't flop around and do any more damage to the neck. I felt the heat of his skin through the tight gloves, and the heft every time he took a breath—deep breaths with a sharp “chuck!” at the end as if he were sleeping soundly. His whiskers poked at the palms of my hands, suddenly too familiar to be comfortable.

The moon transited slowly in front of me, not really quite full after all, and then the power truck trundled up the road, its yellow flashers lit. The linemen got out and placed traffic cones at each corner of their truck, safe in their own careful routines, even though there hadn't been a car along the road since I'd gotten there. I watched the articulated arm extend, saw a lineman reach up and pull the heavy breaker off with his hot stick.