On Fire Read online

  LARRY BROWN

  ON FIRE

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  This book is for Sam: faithful friend, loyal companion.

  CONTENTS

  Author's Note

  On Fire

  Also by Larry Brown

  Preview of Larry Brown's Joe

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I joined the Oxford, Mississippi, Fire Department when I was 22. It was a big step up for me after driving trucks and forklifts, and I didn’t figure back in 1973 that I’d ever do anything but spend the next thirty years fighting fires.

  But a man never knows what’s going to become of his life. We aren’t given any promises that we’ll even live through childhood, that we won’t have to go to war, that we won’t end up dead in a car on some highway.

  Writing was a curveball that I never saw coming. It’s such an improbable and foolish-sounding thing to say in front of anybody: “I’m going to become a writer. I’m going to learn how to write a book.” But I did tell that to a good friend of mine one day a little over twelve years ago, up in a pasture near a pond we were fishing in, and he didn’t laugh. He might have found it hard to believe that I could accomplish such a thing, but he didn’t laugh. He just listened to me seriously and nodded his head.

  I figured writing might be like learning how to build houses or lay brick, or even fight fires. I had one burning thought that I believed was true. If I wrote long enough and hard enough, I’d eventually learn how. My only obligation was feeding my family while I was trying to learn how to do this other thing, and that meant to keep working at the fire department plus the usual extra stuff like carrying bricks and mixing mortar and swinging a hammer and cutting pulpwood with a chain saw. But I was willing to do all that in order to have the scattered afternoons and weekends to write. From 1980 on I wrote steadily, filling up pages, mailing off manuscripts, publishing a story every couple of years and then finally a first book of stories in 1988. There’ve been two novels and another book of stories since then.

  I left the fire department over three years ago, and it’s been over four since I started writing On Fire. An autobiographical book like this is something new for me. Up to now it’s just been stories and poems and novels. It’s all just stories, no matter how long they are or what form they take. And any book in progress is kind of like a friend who comes and stays with you for a good long while, who lives in the house and inside your mind. It stays there through meals and sleeping and waking and cutting the grass and tending to the kids and taking out the garbage. When the book is being formed in your mind and on the page, I mean the actual accumulation of the work itself, day by day or hour by hour, it has a life of its own and it is living for that period of time with you.

  All that was true with On Fire. But certain things were different this time around. I’d spent years imagining things for my fiction, all the stories and the novels I’d written. In this case, however, every event had already happened—or was happening as I wrote it, when I was still at the fire department. Usually it was a simple matter of remembering the situations, and that wasn’t hard because so many of the things that happened over those sixteen years left an indelible impression on my memory. You don’t forget death and pain, or fear. All the events were there, but I had to try and make some sense out of it.

  This book is an attempt to explore what I felt about my years in the fire service and what it was like to live through those years, and the way two totally different careers had to mesh and make room for each other, until one of them finished first. There’s a ton of stuff that’s not in here that could’ve been, but in whatever I’m writing, I want to put in only the things the story needs and leave everything else out. I’ve tried to do that here as well.

  Larry Brown

  May 26, 1993

  Yocona, Mississippi

  I love what I do with my hands and with the hose. I love the knots I know how to tie, the clove hitch for raising equipment to a high window, the mighty bowline that is the only one you can trust your life to, the only one you tie before rappelling off a building. You tie it to a chimney or a strong piece of steel and then you run the line through the steel loop at your safety belt and then you step off the edge and lean back and trust your life to it, and it never lets you down. You walk backwards down the side of the building, not ever fearing, not ever thinking about what might happen if it slips, because it won’t slip. You have to believe in the bowline before you can believe you can rappel.

  I love the way the lights are set up on the side of the road at a wreck and I love the way the Hurst Tool opens with its incredible strength and I love the way it crushes the roof posts of a car and I love the way you can nudge it into the hinges of a door and pop the pins off and let the door fall and reach in to see your patient’s legs and what position they are in.

  I love to drive to any incident, love to run the siren, to run fast but careful through town. I love the smell of smoke and the feeling of fear that comes on me when I see that a fire is already through the roof and licking at the sky because I know that I am about to be tested again, my muscles, my brain, my heart.

  I love my old torn-up boots, the toes skinned and burned, my wrinkled gloves, sootstreaked and charred, my dirty coat and frayed turnout pants.

  I love to go down on the floor and see the smoke over me, worm my way forward to the fire, the hose as hard as a brick, the scuffed rubber on the end of the fog nozzle. I love the two-and-a-half-inch hoses and the big chrome nozzles that no one man can hold, the red axes and the pry bars and the pike poles that we tear down ceilings with, looking for devious pockets of fire, sneaky little bastards that will smolder and rekindle the house after we’re back at the fire station asleep in our beds, and I love to stand at the pump panel and set the relief valve and hear it open when a line is shut down, and I love to know that I can operate this $200,000 piece of equipment like I’ve been taught so that nobody will get his ass burned up because of me. I love going to a bar called Ireland’s with my partners when we’re off duty, and I love the movies we watch at the station and the meals we cook and eat and the targets we shoot with our bows in the afternoons, washing our cars and trucks in the parking lot and sitting out front of the station in chairs at night hollering at people we know passing on the street. These men are like a family to me, and the only thing I can relate it to is being in the Marine Corps, where everybody, black or white or brown or tan, wore the same uniform, all assembled for a common purpose, a brotherhood. This thing’s the same thing.

  I’m a grown man but I only weigh about 135 pounds soaking wet. I’m nearly the smallest guy in the department, which is a disadvantage sometimes when feats of strength are called for. Say, if you’re breaking down a door with an ax beside some big guy who is about six foot three and 250 or so. All you can do is keep swinging, keep trying to get the job done.

  Our department has thirty-nine men, three stations, four pumpers, one ladder truck that will also pump plenty, one crash truck, one van, three pickups, and two cars and three miles of hose. We also have ladders, axes, forcible entry tools, rappelling gear, ropes, safety belts, breathing apparatus, nozzles, generators, a Hurst Tool (Jaws of Life), flashlights, pike poles, entry saws, boltcutters, fire extinguishers, and many many many other tools.

  All of this stuff is very expensive and most of it will hurt you, pinch your fingers off, cut you or bruise you or abrade you in some way that will be pretty painful later. I say later because of adrenaline. Your kid knocks the car out of gear, it begins to roll down a hill, you run and catch it and stop it by grabbing the bumper because of adrenaline. A man turns a tractor over on himself, and his son lifts it off. That, too, is adrenaline at work, the gland flowing, making you more than you normally would be. The adrenaline starts pumping when we run to
the trucks. When the big starter kicks in and she rolls over and coughs like a dinosaur waking up, the adrenaline is flowing. It makes you not feel pain, not ignore it, actually, just not even feel it when it happens. It’s happened to me and I’ve seen it happen to other men at fires and wrecks, and it’s there to protect you, make you strong so you don’t get hurt. Adrenaline lets people do what they have to, what they might not be able to do without it even if they had to.

  Potential disaster: maybe that’s why I can’t sleep. I fear two things more than others: a leaking gasoline tanker and a leaking liquid propane container, whether stationary or on wheels, turned over in a ditch or whatever. Ignition, from whatever source, a cigarette, the hot tailpipe or manifold on a car down the road, will be what kills you and all your men, your pretty red fire trucks, anybody else who couldn’t or didn’t run. But I also fear ammonium nitrate, and Malathion, and planes crashing at my airport, and lots of other things. Wrecks on the way to anything. Backdrafts, flashovers. Also not having anything decent on HBO to watch when I’m on duty. We prefer S and V (sex and violence), but we’ll go with a nature show on The Discovery Channel if that’s all that’s flowing. We can’t stay adrenalined up all the time.

  Things in this room: Radio. Mike. Scanner. Encoder. Fire phone. Dispatcher’s desk. Chair. Playboy magazines. Maps. A five-foot-square aerial photo of the University of Mississippi. TV. VCR. Uniform shirts hanging on the wall. Microwave. Stove. Refrigerator. Sink. Coffee pot. An empty cake bell smeared with pink frosting. A four-foot stick with a crooked plastic finger screwed into the end of it with the ominous words THE FINGER written on it in green ink. Shoeshine kit. A table and some captain’s chairs. Photographs of us in action. Two folded flags, one United States, one Mississippi. Liquid Paper. Playing cards. Hundreds of telephone numbers. Run reports. A PA system. A flyswatter. A digital clock flashing 5:51. Some tomatoes. An onion. A cantaloupe. Keys. A videocassette of Top Gun. Yesterday’s newspapers. Day before yesterday’s newspapers. Memos from Uncle Chiefy. Coffee cups. Somebody’s dirty socks. A whetrock. Ink pens. Cartoons about firemen.

  Now I’m sleepy, with fifty-five minutes to go before I get off duty. My partners have been moaning and groaning back there in the bedroom with the pre-wake jitters. I’m the world’s worst about talking in my sleep. They can and do carry on conversations with me while I’m conked out. I’ve been known to talk about John Wayne, or just holler out something crazy and wake myself up. I think I must have a sleeping disorder, but I don’t think I need to go to the doctor about it. I think I only have it when I’m up here. When I’m home in my own bed with Mary Annie, I sleep fine. I don’t have a fire phone in my bedroom.

  I think all these things are connected, adrenaline and sleep and Mary Annie and fear and THE FINGER and a bunch of guys piled up in beds snoring in the dark.

  I just stepped outside to get the paper, just as the garbagemen rode by. I waved, they waved. Their work day is just beginning. Mine will be over in forty-five minutes if the fire phone doesn’t ring. I hope it doesn’t ring. I’ll be happy to stay right here and read or write and watch movies and eat. Maybe even sleep some. It sure would be nice.

  Fear. The fine line you walk where what you have to do drives you to do it up against what your better judgment tells you not to. A firefighter cannot be a coward. He can be a lot of things, a prick, a thief, a liar, but he cannot be a coward and he probably will not be a child molester, although I’d bet somebody a million dollars there is at least one child molester somewhere in the fire service. A man who won’t tote his own weight, who won’t hump his own hose, won’t be tolerated. They’ll blackball him and nobody will want him on his shift. I’ve seen men who were reluctant to enter a burning building. It does not endear them to you, not if you think about going down inside one and him being the only one immediately available to pull you out. But there’s not anybody I’m working with that I’m uneasy about. This is as it should be. Our biggest worry most days is what to eat and what to watch on HBO. This is as it should be, too. Our motto is, A well-rested firefighter is a good firefighter.

  Potential disaster was averted a while ago, around two-thirty. I was back there, trying to go to sleep but actually just rolling around in the dark, and the fire phone rang. There was a gas main leaking on Jackson Avenue, and a large amount of gas had apparently already escaped, so everything we have went out the door except for the ladder truck and the crash truck.

  These sleepyheads had it all under control when I arrived in the van and went 10-23. That means you’re on the scene, engaged in an assignment. Our crew was catching a plug and had already advanced an inch-and-a-half hand line down the street and put the nozzle in a fog pattern to disperse the gas. Standard procedure. Evidently some dilbert-headed gal or guy had come out of a bar called Forrester’s with one too many cold ones under his or her belt, backed over the gas main, and then driven off without telling anybody about it. Bad move. A police officer just happened to be driving by a block away and smelled it.

  If, at close range, you’ve never heard a three-quarter-inch gas main shrieking all its gas out at once, you’d probably be pretty surprised at how loud it is. Somebody has to go right up to it while they hold a fog stream on it and try to get a plug down inside the pipe and stop the leak. Johnny was already doing that when I walked up. I got down next to him and held a flashlight for him. The water ran down inside my turnout coat and started getting my shirt and cigarettes wet. We used to use things the boys called butt plugs, conical hard rubber plugs you drove down into the pipe with a hammer. Now we have rubberized expanding plugs with a long shank that you insert deep into the pipe and then turn with a wing nut until it seals. You don’t want to get one down in there and not get it tight enough. It’ll fly back out like a bullet and knock your eyeball out. All this is happening while you’re bent over, wondering if the gas has spread out enough to find an ignition source. It’s nervous-making, but duty you have to do.

  It worked. We sealed the leak, called the gas company, and nothing was ignited. It just smelled like a two-thousand-ton fart. We rolled the hose up and went back home. Then I went to bed and rolled around in the dark for a long time and then finally decided that since I couldn’t sleep, I might as well get up and write. Plus, the snoring was driving me crazy.

  I was cooking some ribs one evening and drinking a beer, taking life easy on a Saturday afternoon. The ribs were parboiling in some water, getting tender, and about dark I was going to put them over a fire on the grill, slap some barbecue sauce on them, cook my family a little feast. Maybe we were going to watch a movie, too, I don’t know. That’s one of our big things: cook something on the grill outside and then watch a good movie while we’re eating, then kind of just fall out all over the living room to finish watching it, then sometimes even watch another one. I usually have several cold beers while I’m doing that. The ribs were going to cook for a couple of hours and I had plenty of beer.

  The phone rang and my plans got changed. It was the dispatcher at Station No. 1, and he said we had a fire at the Law School at Ole Miss, and all hands were being called in. It was what we call a Code Red.

  I cut off the ribs but I did take my beer. I thought if the fire wasn’t too bad, a beer would be pretty good on the way back. I drove my little truck at what is an abnormal speed for me, about sixty-five. I live about ten miles from Oxford so it didn’t take long to get there.

  You never know what to expect except that if it’s bad you can certainly expect to be dirty and exhausted and possibly coughing or throwing up or maybe even burned, your ears singed a little before it’s over. I knew the building but I’d only been in the bottom of it once, and in the library once, and that was on the second floor. The fire we had that night was on the fifth, top floor.

  I stopped by Station No. 1 and got my turnouts, pulling my pickup right into the truck bay where a lot of leather boots were lying, where my partners had kicked them off and left them. The turnout pants stand on low shelves, folded down with the rub
ber boots already inside them, so that all you have to do is step into them and pull the pants up, snap them shut, grab your coat and helmet, climb on the truck and roll out the door. Every piece of equipment in the house was gone, our big diesel pumper, the van, and the ladder truck that could reach ten stories high. The dispatcher came out for a second and said we had a working fire but they didn’t know how bad it was yet. I drove fast through town, knowing where all the cops were.

  The ladder truck was being set up when I pulled into the parking lot. There was a little smoke showing from the top of the building. I could see our boys in full gear down on their knees putting airpacks on. I put my turnouts on, got my gloves in one hand and my helmet in the other, and ran to report to the assistant chief in charge that I was there and ready for my assignment. Off-duty people were arriving all around me. They’d called everybody in.

  The structure was a five-story building with a concrete exterior, lined with windows about seven or eight feet long and about five and a half feet tall. None of the windows were designed to open, had no hinges or handles, and the glass was tempered, somewhere between a quarter and a half inch thick. There was no outside egress to the building except through the first and top floors. It was not equipped with a sprinkler system, since it was considered to be a fireproof building, but it did have a wet standpipe system with those little piss-ant hoses.

  I found out that the alarm inside the building had been going for quite a while, but people had simply ignored it. Kept walking around in there, conducting their whatever. I was told to put on an airpack and climb the stairwell with some other firefighters to the top floor and descend into the building to try and locate the fire. I donned my apparatus, found my partners, and we started up. We all had flashlights.