Burning Down the House (20 page)

His girlfriend came to the crash site after we had put him in the ambulance, and she stood at the police tape before calling out to me, “Is that Kevin who's hurt? Is he dead?”

You try not to give anything away at the scene itself—you never know who you're talking to or what condition their family member is in. I said we didn't know who was hurt yet, the sort of half answer that always ends up being caught out as a lie.

“Well, that's my car. That was my car. I know the sticker. Where's Kevin?”

And she came under the tape towards us, fast, and I yelled, and another firefighter knocked her down, a big firefighter who then wrapped her in his arms and just held her while she went from furious to panicked to tears—even though her boyfriend had taken her car without permission, without a licence and without insurance.

I've done it too, grabbing and catching the wife of one of my firefighters, stopping her at an accident where four teenagers had piled a sedan into an embankment, and two of the teens had come over from the back seat and hit the windshield with their heads. She had been sure that her son was in the car, a car now dug nose deep into the simple roses and the night-smelling lupins, the car crumpled and still and cooling beneath an early spring moon. It was the late 1990s then, and I was struck by what an old-fashioned accident it was—that it had the kind of calamitous injuries we used to see all the more regularly before the use of seat belts became the law. They were injuries that happen when a car stops and its passengers don't, sailing over the seats like missiles and hitting the windshield hard enough to star the glass, hard enough that you wonder how it is they don't break their foolish necks in the process. Two stars of cracked glass from the passengers in the back seat—but the driver and front-seat passenger were virtually unhurt. None of them, as it turned out, was the son of the woman I had to tackle.

But she hit me and pushed and swore anyway, and she probably remembers none of it now, even though I can't forget the language she used—where I could go and what I could do with myself. Teeth white and shining in the half-light—I had more than a passing fear that she was going to bite me if I didn't let her go—her eyes big and unnaturally bright, the panic making her unrecognizable.

You can laugh back at the station, but the sting of it, the sheer suddenness of the event, doesn't always go away.

It was a big night, the kind of night when the moon comes up over the horizon and sets the tone for the whole arch of the sky. Down on the bay there was a tanker heading towards Holyrood, its lights bright and staring but somehow small as well, cast out in the big silver and black bowl of sea.

I think I was close to that kind of angry panic, but no one was trying to stop me. Everyone was just letting me run.

That accident with the four teenagers was one that stuck with me for years. It was only a few miles from my house, only the stretch of a finger across the town map that I carried between the front seats of the truck. Sitting on the wood floor in my living room, looking up towards the top of the hill, I would always know that it had happened there, just over the crest.

One minute Eddie Sharpe was up on top of the big pile of burning brush with a pike pole, turning over the branches and slash so we can get the water in there; the next he's just plain disappeared, and a huge column of sparks is shooting up all around where he had been standing so that it resembles a magic trick, as if Eddie is supposed to reappear somewhere else on the stage, miraculously spreading his arms and saying “Ta-dah.” Instead, we hear him yelling from right down inside the pile—it's something like eight full tandem dump truck loads of slash burning like crazy in a gravel pit—because the pile's burned through from underneath and he's tumbled straight in, up to his knees in searing hot cherry red embers.

It was almost funny once he got out, so we teased him for the rest of the evening, five or six of us fighting that huge fire for the better part of a Saturday night until we were so tired we could barely stand.

EIGHTEEN

Black night. Quiet. Another accident, the pager going off close to one o'clock in the morning.

“MVA with injuries,” the dispatcher said. “Dogberry Hill Road, above St. Thomas Line.” Even as I picked up the phone to confirm we were rolling, I knew that the call was close to my house, that the chances were I would be the first one there, unless Gord Squires was still awake nine or ten houses above me and already on his way out to his car.

“Portugal Cove–St. Philip's responding,” I told the dispatcher.

By the time I got in my pickup, there were already trucks on the road from the other side of the community, the small pumper out the station doors first so there would be medical gear soon. As I was driving past the store, I heard the radio key up and heard the rescue truck leaving the station, this time on my side of town, and I recognized Bob Lamar's voice on the radio.

I was well ahead of all of them by then, but at least there were other people on the way.

The night was bright with moonlight, the road clear and empty. I turned up Dogberry Hill Road—and all of a sudden I was on top of the accident.

I remember thinking that all the houses along the road had turned their backs: no lights were on. The houses looked lumped and black and silent, and there in the ditch was one nose-down car with no real damage visible. But there were injured people caught in my headlights like moths, bleeding, elbows bent, hands held high.

Just like that, there was someone pounding on my closed window, while I was still figuring out where the emergency brake was, caught in the heavy mist between sleep and wakefulness, just trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I couldn't even figure out how to open my door—my hand was fumbling around the inside of the truck.

“I'm the driver,” the man was yelling, his palms flat on my closed window. “I'm the driver.”

Even if I couldn't figure out how to open the door, rolling the window down seemed simple enough, as if I were at a drive-in.

“I'm the driver,” he said again.

Lost, I reached out through the open window and opened my truck door from the outside.

“There are more firefighters on the way,” I said, and I could already hear the siren of the rescue rolling down the valley, brassy and hard against the cold of the night. I was putting my fire jacket on as I walked up to the wrecked car, and I could see there was someone standing next to it, in the ditch. One hand outstretched, the other pulled up at her left side, elbow bent—a teenager standing like Botticelli's Venus, I remember thinking, even though her face was covered in blood and there was a long horizontal split in her forehead, just at her scalp, a sharp tear where her skin had broken when she hit the windshield face-first. She was wearing a sweater, a soft-looking blue sweater, except the only place it was still blue was in a V under her chin. Her face was completely scarlet except for the cornflower of her eyes.

“Am I cut bad?” she said, and I got ready to lie.

Standing in the ditch and looking hard at her scalp, I could see there were a lot of small bleeders; blood was welling steadily out of the gap in her hairline and flowing down her face. But there didn't seem to be any major arteries cut—nothing pumping or spraying, nothing losing enough blood that she should pass out as a result. Still, she was wavering back and forth, moving just slightly, as if she were a long stalk of grass being shifted by a small and fickle breeze.

“Not too bad,” I said. “Just hang on a minute or two. Just stand still. There'll be someone else here.”

I didn't want her to move, not even to sit down on the shoulder of the road. Going into the windshield often means neck injuries, and I couldn't stop to stand behind her and immobilize that neck, that thin, soft, blood-streaked neck, not while I was the only one there, not when there were more victims who could be more seriously hurt.

The rescue truck was coming straight down the valley by the Old Broad Cove River now, and I could hear the hills playing tricks with the siren. Sometimes the echo of the siren was louder than the siren itself, the sound overlapping and weaving through itself and making the familiar sound foreign and complex.

The rescue truck would mean equipment and extra hands and at least one more firefighter, and there would be others from the valley quickly enough. Gord Squires, Joe Hanames—they'd be in their cars by now, maybe one of them at the wheel of the big pumper, because it was late enough that all the firefighters would have been home in bed. Gord and Joe. Both steady hands—steadier by far than me. I wished they would hurry.

It may have seemed cold and callous, but I was already moving on from the injured girl, working the checklist, doing all the dispassionate things I was supposed to do. Around the car, looking at the way the frame was set down tight into the gravel and sand, trying to decide if there could be someone trapped underneath the chassis, trying to decide if there was any risk the car might start to move. The driver was still following me around like a gnat, still chirping that he was the driver.

I cut him off. “How many people in the car?”

He didn't answer.

“How. Many. People,” I said, holding him by the shoulders until he finally told me there had been four.

I counted him, the girl in the ditch and another teenager in the front seat, both hands on the dashboard.

I almost stepped on the fourth person, mostly because he was in tight against the side of the car, lying in the gravel, feet down in the ditch, and I was looking back into the headlights of my truck. The odd thing is that my training may well have saved his life. I ended up treating him as if he was the most seriously injured of the four, even though the signs of that were pretty sparse, only because the book would have said to do just that. The training said he should be treated as if he had a skull fracture, which seemed absolutely ridiculous. As it turned out, it was exactly what was wrong with him. He had what looked like fluid in one ear, and he was disoriented, lying prone in the gravel and unable to explain who he was or just what had happened. His back was bent over the edge of the embankment, his feet lower than his head, his body in a long curve.

I heard the rescue truck cut its siren and make the corner at the bottom of the hill, grinding down into the lower gears to make the steep grade. When I heard the air brakes lock on, I went back to the truck, where Bob was climbing down from behind the wheel.

“Three injured, two serious,” I remember saying. “Girl is a bleeder, head injury on the other side. We'll need another ambulance.”

One ambulance had already been on the way—standard for a car accident with injuries; the dispatcher would have rolled one right away at the same time he paged us out. But it had to come from St. John's, ten or fifteen minutes away, less maybe if they knew the accident was a serious one and pulled out all the stops, stomping the pedal enough to feel the heavy ambulance lift as it swept over bumps in the road.

The bleeding girl in the ditch, spectacularly cut as she was, would wind up needing only stitches—many, many stitches. The guy in the gravel would end up in surgery and with a plate in the front of his head, and he left me with the lingering fear that doing the right thing somehow wasn't enough. I had acted the way I had been trained, but without ever believing his skull could actually be fractured.

I'd been to dozens of accidents where someone had simply mentioned that their neck hurt, so we had put a neck collar on them, strapped them to a backboard and sent them uncomfortably off to the hospital—because that was the protocol.

Either way, the accident marked me up—not because I made the right choice about who was injured, but because it just felt wrong to leave the bleeding girl alone and terrified while I searched for someone who might need my care more. I left her because I had to, but not with any sort of comfort.

Mr. Skull-fracture, he doesn't come back in my dreams—I can barely conjure up more than the shape of him in the dark, lying in the gravel next to the wrecked car. But her . . . if she's been in my dreams once, she's been there a hundred times, and I swear she sometimes whispers to me when I'm actually awake.

“Am I cut bad?”

Cold chills run right down my back if I'm awake, and if I'm asleep I sit up, bolt upright and rigid, taking the sheets and blankets with me, looking around the room to see if I can get a mere glimpse of her.

She's probably long over the crash by now.

I heard afterwards that she was all right, that the cuts didn't even really scar unless you knew exactly where to look. A friend of someone's mother told us that, although no one ever got around to telling us officially.

The pager called us out for a house fire in Windsor Heights in the middle of the workday, and I knew they were going to be short of firefighters, so I headed across town with the siren on. It took ages to get across the city, even with the siren, and for an ordinary pageout I probably wouldn't have bothered—the trucks would be packed up and gone, no sign of the firefighters at all, by the time I got there. But this was different: a house fire means hours of work, and many of the firefighters who worked in the city wouldn't even get the page. Through the sheer luck of geography, I could pick up the pages in my newsroom.

They were so short of firefighters when I got there that I was put into breathing gear right away. The front windows were already out of the living room, flames washing up over the front of the house and back into the second floor, and there was heavy smoke all over the upstairs.

Mike Reid and I punched a hole up through the ceiling in a back bedroom, checking for fire extension, and at about the same time the second floor let go over the living room, so that the floor just disappeared on the other side of the door, leaving a parlour trick where a door opens onto a sheer drop-off.

Other firefighters tried to save the family dog, a golden Lab, from the garage, but it was too late—the dog was already dead, smoke all over the place like the tide had come in and submerged the house completely. Later, a family member wrote a letter to the editor, thanking us for trying to save the dog, and saying we were to be congratulated for trying. We were thanked for another small act of compassion as well: on our way into the attic, one of the firefighters had taken a wedding dress out of the closet above the fire, a family heirloom still safely sleeved in its dry-cleaning bag, and had carefully laid it across the bed in a closed bedroom well away from the fire.