Burning Down the House (7 page)

The firefighters from my crew were moving around the car in slow motion, trying to decide if it was likely to slide the rest of the way into the water, knowing we'd be unable to stop it if it did.

You're supposed to stabilize a car before you begin working on it, so that it doesn't start moving and injure someone else. Sandbags or wheel chocks work well on the road or on the shoulder, but there's not much that works well in wet mud. There was nothing to attach the chains or the come-along to, only long, bright green sawgrass on the banks of the river, its roots set deep into the soft, wet mud sponge. No trees on the bank, just a farmer's fence, the posts coloured a silvered grey that meant they'd either hardened off to an almost astounding toughness or else rotted away at ground level, held up by the taut barbed wire running around the flat river pasture. Still a new firefighter, I felt almost like a bystander—but more than that. It was as if a window was opening; I was realizing that even someone my age wasn't immune, that wrong turns and loose gravel could happen to anyone at any time. That bad luck had a way of just waiting for people, and that even I might not be safe.

The more experienced firefighters had a way of doing things at a scene as if they were following some kind of whispered instructions only they could hear, their ears on a different frequency than any I could tune into. I'd spent hours memorizing the contents of every compartment on every truck: which heavy door hid the saws, where the chimney-fire gear was kept. But the other firefighters all seemed to know much more than that—not only where things were, but also which ones would be needed, and in what order. Gear came out of the trucks and made its way down to a tarpaulin near the car, heavy equipment being laid out side by side in lines, like huge surgical tools on a dark blue plastic tray.

Down in the mud, the firefighters were moving like astronauts, slowed by the viscous goo around their boots. They were bringing down the big power units and the cutters, were putting the heavy tools on the hood, getting ready to set out everything so that it would be close at hand when they started working. The tools caught in the bright lights, and the woman in the car started screaming.

We put a blanket over people when we start to work; it keeps sharp scraps of metal away from them and catches the sprays of breaking glass when the windows are smashed out. I've held blankets in front of scores of victims, but I have a hard time believing I'd be able to stand it if someone did it for me. It's not so much the claustrophobia as the feeling of having everything that's going on kept away from you. Dentists keep their instrument trays out of sight for good reason, and firefighters often do too.

The firefighters weren't that far along yet; the blanket that would cover the victim was out of its plastic sleeve but still on the roof of the car. The cutters with their big bird-beak titanium jaws must have been threatening enough to the woman inside, lying the way they were, tilted to one side on the hood right in front of her.

I didn't get to see the actual rescue. I didn't get to take part in it, either. It's slow work, and they had other plans for me. Chief Wood arrived in his big dark blue Crown Victoria, the firelight circling slowly in the windshield. He grabbed me by one shoulder and turned me away from the wreck, so that all I could see was his outline in the bright glare of the car's headlights.

“You take her and get in the back of the rescue,” the chief said, gesturing to the front-seat passenger from the car. The firefighter who had brought her up from the car had gotten a blanket from the side bay of the rescue, and she was wearing it wrapped around her shoulders and hanging to her ankles like a long coat. She was standing looking down at the car, and she had her arms across her chest under the blanket, her chin and mouth tucked down into the dark grey folds of cloth.

As it got darker, a night with no moon and out on a road past all street lights, the crash scene was coming into sharp relief. With all the lights shining down, it was like watching the little big top, a one-ring circus that was both awful and hard to take your eyes off, the performers all yellow-clad, reflective tape flashing when it hit the spotlights just right.

I told the chief I hadn't written the certification exam for first aid yet.

“I don't want you to do first aid,” he said gruffly. “I don't want you to do anything. I just want you to talk to her.” He slammed the door of the rescue behind me after I clambered onto the long backbench seat in the truck.

It was a strange place to be sitting, both of us with our backs up against the side doors. Normally it would be packed tight with three firefighters in full gear. Now the space seemed inexplicably large— perhaps because we were pointedly sitting as far away from each other as we could, as if even the chance that our bodies could touch in those circumstances was somehow wrong. The chief had reached in and turned the switch so that the inside of the truck was lit up by the dome light, and so that the windows turned halfway to mirrors against the dark of the night. I could see myself over her shoulder, looking over-large in my yellow jacket, and I could see my face, trying desperately to bend itself around small talk.

“Out for the evening?” I tried. Where do you start? She had already been asked whether she was hurt, had already had another firefighter chat away at her while running a practised eye over everything from the way she moved to whether there was clear fluid in her ears, whether her pupils were the same size and reacting to light.

If I were doing it now, after years of practice, I'd know how to cheat. I'd start by asking her first name and telling her mine, and I'd take off my helmet and the Nomex hood underneath. I'd know enough to leave my hair all distractingly spiky and messed up by static or sweat as the hood came off—anything to knock her out and away from the accident, to make a simple, distracting, human link. The technique is practised and deliberate, like so many other things, even though the idea is to make it seem as spontaneous as possible.

“Will she be all right?” the woman asked, and then I realized that the chief had put me in the rig with her mostly because we were so close in age. She was wearing a dark sweater and her face was startlingly pale with the black glass behind her, red patches high on both her cheeks. Beautiful in the haunting way that young women often are, thin, fine lips and a narrow face that seemed to be drawn all out of vertical planes and lines. Light brown hair, straight on both sides of her face like a frame.

“She'll be fine,” I said as reassuringly as I could, even though I wasn't sure.

I was lucky that time—it turned out I was right. You learn eventually to take those questions sideways, so that you don't actually give anyone anything to hang false hopes on. “They're just taking their time, being careful,” is an easy answer, because it's always both true and false. Regardless, they'd be careful—but that didn't mean anything.

I had trained on all the tools by then, knew their heft and how awkward many of them were to hold for any length of time, and I recognized the thudding, heavy beat of the compressor out there in the dark. I knew they would start by breaking out every single window in the car, and then they'd take the cutters and start on the doorposts. You train by labelling them
A
,
B
and
C
so you never forget which ones to cut first. Then they were going to pull the steering wheel back away from her, and it would make disturbingly loud screeches and moans, the occasional pistol-shot bang as some piece of metal reached its bursting point and failed all at once. Sometimes it happens so sharply that the vehicle shudders with the force and the sound startles everyone.

The firefighters were going to violently destroy what was left of the car, cut it completely apart so that they could ease the half-backboard down between the girl and the seat, and then strap her tight in place before lifting her out. The chief had called for a second pumper, and I didn't understand why until it rumbled up behind us and I heard the rattle of the come-along chains. They parked the pumper across the road and ran all the chain—and a length of the heavy rescue rope, too—out across the top of the marsh, managing to loop it around one back wheel of the car in the mud.

The rope might not hold the full weight of the car—even a heavy kernmantle rope will stretch and snap under enough weight—but it was better than having the car start to move. I know now that the chief was counting the financial cost too: stretch rescue rope even once and it comes out of service and gets thrown away. It's absolutely guaranteed to its certified weight—but only for the first use. Once the roof of the car was off, there would be as many as five firefighters inside the destroyed vehicle, and the chief decided not to take any chances.

“She only just got it,” the woman said to me.

“Got what?” I said, drawn back all at once from the sounds outside. “The car. Carla only just got the car. It's used, but she just bought it.”

From the river, down in the mud and the water and the big circular puddles of spotlight, there was suddenly screaming again.

Loud.

“Is she all right? Is she going to be all right?”

I tried to judge from the screaming, a mug's game because everyone is so different, tried to guess whether she had snapped out of the shock and was just frightened or actually in a lot of pain. I heard the compressor engage and knew the hydraulics were working, and that the cutters were taking their first clean bite through the car. But I couldn't find a way to push out any words to answer her questions. My head was trying to find its way onto solid ground, and I was slipping in my own deep mud. I wanted her to refine the question, to ask her, “What's ‘all right'? Alive? Walking? Spine-injured? Rehab?”

Then the woman I was supposed to be keeping calm tried to get out of the rescue. When she pulled the handle open and started to push on the door, I reached across and grabbed her by the wrist, encircling her small arm as gently as I could, the tips of my thumb and index finger barely touching.

That was all it took. I didn't have to pull or really even hold her arm, just gently wrap my fingers around it, and she stopped moving as suddenly as if I had bound her in place, like a magic lasso. Like all she needed was the tiniest reason to stop, because while she felt drawn to the noise outside, really she didn't want to see anything at all. As we sat there, frozen like that, I watched the emergency lights of first the ambulance, and then the police, and finally the wrecker, dance down the hill behind us in the big wing mirrors of the rescue, and neither of us spoke again.

Her friend Carla, it turned out, had back injuries low down, and savagely torn muscles, the kind of constant pain that can wind up changing your life so that you can't even remember what it was like when you used to wake up without hurting. Once they had her free, she screamed more when they put her on the backboard and then into the mesh Stokes basket, and even though they carried her up as evenly and steadily as they could, the firefighters kept slipping left and right in the mud, and she screamed with every small jolt all the way up the bank to the side of the road.

I let go of Carla's friend so that the police could talk to her in the back of their own car. They had come up to the window and knocked, and after I let her go I rode back to Wolfville on the same long bench seat where the chief had placed me, hemmed in on both sides by tired, dirty firefighters who smelled like wet brass and clamshells. Big firefighters who actually did something, who didn't get sent just to sit in the rescue.

Even though we hosed the gear down as soon as we got back to the station, the fine red and black silt of the mud had worked its way into the fabric of the other firefighters' bunker pants, and they had that shadow—a carry-over of past circumstances, a little black cloud, a badge, a deep-seated messaging smudge—until we spent a Monday night training with firefighting foam, both the fluffy detergent foam and the heavier protein foam that smelled for all the world like hotdogs. After that, all our gear was clean for a while, as if our histories had been magically overwritten.

By then I knew I was learning a secret alphabet, a different kind of code, a type of shorthand that passed for identification between firefighters, so you'd designate things as “the woman in the reservoir,” “the burning pig” or “the asphalt-truck crash.” It was a remarkably private language, something inside the firefighting fraternity and, most times, inside the particular department itself.

The geography of firefighting is built on experience, and it's built by every call. Windsor, I'd learn, was the town where the fire department had been called out to a propane explosion and found a house where all the sills were broken off, and two pies that had been cooling on a kitchen table had glued themselves to the ceiling, driven straight upwards by the force of the explosion. You tend to lay things out in your own distinct memory map; it's a pattern of dots where things have happened, sometimes insignificant things— like the house I've always called the bacon-fire house because, every time the family cooked bacon, their smoke alarm went off and we would get sent to check it out. I've built my own mental pocket guide to two very different communities, including indelible marks that indicate where things went wrong—or, worse, the inevitables I tried to change and couldn't. It's all mine, my private complication— no two firefighters have been on the exact same pattern of calls, have been in the same places or have the same memories.

Bit by bit, you write your own shorthand.

The man who came from the propane company to teach us about how stable the gas could actually be had a trick at the end of the lecture, where he'd flick a lit cigarette, end over end—everyone smoked in the fire hall then—into a glass he'd carefully filled to the top with propane. Falling into the glass, the cigarette was supposed to go out, proving that propane will only ignite when it's perfectly mixed with air—and the trick worked, every time.