On Fire Read online

  While I work I think of the things I’ll try to write when I get home. And now I am home, in the kitchen, supper finished, MA and the boys up in the front room watching television, trying to let me alone, let me work, let me write. I sit at the typewriter, a new Smith-Corona that I will type on until it is completely useless, until the keys don’t work, until the return carriage slips.

  I’m writing something about a family of people walking down a road with their possessions in their hands, homeless people, fruit pickers, laborers, an old man, his wife, a boy, two girls. I know that it is the beginning of another novel, and in my mind I begin to call it Nomads. But later I will call it Joe.

  I have chosen this thing to do, away from my family, the doors closed, characters who form in my head and move to the paper, black symbols on a white sheet, no more than that. It may seem senseless to anybody else, but I know there is a purpose to my work: the spending of years at the typewriter writing until I become better than I am now, until I can publish a book, until I can see that book in a library or a bookstore.

  I love this thing, even if it does not love back.

  It’s never any trouble finding a wreck we’re sent to because everybody else is already there, the Highway Patrol, the ambulances. It has to be so bad that nobody else can do anything before they call us. We’re kind of like the last resort. The attendants will have already made their initial survey and determined that the patient cannot be removed without the extrication tool, the Jaws of Life. Traffic will often be blocked, the pulsing red and blue lights visible from a great distance.

  This accident is about two miles south of the city limits. A late model New Yorker is thirty yards off the right-hand side of the highway, the driver’s door almost up against a tree, the result of a head-on collision. The other car is beside the road, broken glass scattered, but either there are no victims to be extricated or they have already been taken to the hospital by another ambulance.

  Everybody knows what to do. Canvas has to be laid out, lights set up, blocks, chains, the gasoline engine unit that furnishes the hydraulic power for the Hurst Tool, and the tool itself. Thirty-foot hoses have to be connected from the power unit to the tool, the unit cranked, a careful examination of the patient made, and then we begin. He is in a great amount of pain and his legs are trapped. The tree is not blocking the door and we force it open, pop the pins top and bottom and the door falls off. Getting his legs out will be harder. The dashboard has moved back and down onto him, and we’ll have to do what’s known as a dash roll, where everything, including the steering wheel and the steering column, is pulled forward and up to free him. It’s going to take some time, and our patient is hurting. The one thing we must not do is hurt him any worse.

  One of the things we do first that is nearly standard procedure is to remove most of the roof. We take out the windshield, fasten the shears to the jaws of the tool, and then make four cuts: one on each windshield post, and two in the roof, back behind the driver’s seat, on each side. This allows us to lift the roof up in one piece and flip it back on itself, so that we have an open area to work in, so that we can step right up into the car. We’ve got to be in there to look at things or run the tool from in there.

  One of the things on the car that’s not going to move much when we apply the incredible force of the Hurst Tool to it is the frame. And the biggest piece of steel inside the car that’s connected to the dashboard is the steering column. We fasten chains to the frame and the steering column. Some stuff will break, fly out under pressure and maybe kill the patient, so you hook to something strong. We run the chains up from the front of the frame, over the front bumper, across the hood. We run the other set of chains, once we’ve wrapped them around the column, across the dash where the windshield used to be and across the hood to meet the other set of chains. But we don’t join the chains. We leave maybe a foot and a half of space between them, and then spread the jaws of the tool open that far. All we have to do is hook the chains to the tool with steel pins, start closing the jaws, and then watch and listen to the immense tearing of metal and the steady crunching of plastic and aluminum and rubber and whatever else the dash is composed of as the steering column begins to rise up and split it all in two.

  We can also roll the dash up from the floor. We can place solid oak blocks beneath the car, things that won’t give like the floor of the car will give, spread the jaws between the dash and the floor enough to get a “bite” in some metal, and push it up.

  In this wreck, we have to do both. Sometimes in collisions everything moves back and down, and things get terribly smashed, and this is what has happened here. It’s not long before we have him out, but he tears off a cervical collar once we have him strapped onto the stretcher, and complains about the strap across his chest until the attendants remove it. It’s only when they get him to the hospital and take X rays that they find out he has multiple broken ribs.

  Once our patient is gone, our job is nearly over. A pumper always accompanies us to furnish tools or water or manpower, and sometimes to clean up. The troopers have discretion on this; if they want their highway washed down, we charge a line and put a man on it, sweeping the broken glass and debris into the ditches and roadside grass with the force of the water.

  We pack up all our equipment, our protective blankets for the patient, the lights, the chains, the shears, the blocks, the gasoline unit, the tool, the canvas, everything we unloaded, put the line back on the reel on the pumper, turn around in the road while the troopers halt traffic for us, lights flashing, then turn the lights off and head back to town to refuel and check equipment. Elapsed time: thirty furious minutes running on adrenaline.

  Captain Louie didn’t coerce me into the rabbit-raising operation. It was done strictly of my own volition after I looked at his, which I thought was supreme cool. All his bunnies were in hutches with self-feeders and self-waterers, under a shady shed with big fans blowing cool air through wet feed sacks in to them so they wouldn’t get too hot. It was summer then, and he explained everything to me.

  It took about twenty-one days for a mama rabbit to have her babies. You put a wooden box in there with her and she pulled hair out of her chest and built a nest, and the babies got born, and not long after they were born you bred her again, which only took a few moments after you put the daddy rabbit in there with her. He mounted her almost immediately, hunched her very rapidly a few times, fell off and lay on his side and drummed a hind foot on the floor of the cage—evidently because it was so good for him—and then you took him out. In eight weeks you butchered or sold those young bunnies—they’d dress out at two pounds of meat—and the whole process repeated itself at regular intervals. Captain Louie had hundreds of them. He was selling the shit out of them at two dollars apiece. I bought two does and a buck as fast as I could pull the money out of my pocket and stuck them in the trunk of my car and went home to start building my own hutches, ready for the dollars to roll in.

  Nothing much happened at first. It took a while to figure out that I had two does in the same cage together. I hadn’t seen any sex going on so I just threw all three of them in the cage together and things got taken care of real quick.

  I’d built my hutches out of two-by-fours, half-inch wire mesh sides and floors, and plywood tops. We were still living out in the pasture then, and I noticed that the grass grew a lot thicker and greener under the rabbit hutches. All that good Purina Rabbit Chow I was buying from Leslie Stewart at the feed mill by the fifty-pound bag got sent through those rabbits pretty fast. But I took the fertilizer they made and put it on my tomatoes that year and I’d never raised such pretty ones. Boy, boy, I said to myself. Look at the added benefits.

  It wasn’t long before one of my rabbits, a black-and-white one, went funny. She started hopping and leaping, and kind of screaming, inside her cage. I didn’t know what was wrong but I knew it was time for her to have her babies and I told MA that I was going to bring her inside the trailer and put her in the bathtub and watch
her, which I did. I sat on top of the commode lid and watched her for a long time. She did some more screaming and jumping around in there, and then she died. I could hardly believe it. I took her out into the yard and performed a Caesarean section on her with a sharp knife, by flashlight, and discovered eight little well-formed rabbits, nearly hairless, ears tucked down slick on their heads, all encased in their tiny amniotic sacs, waiting to be born, and dead, my little black-and-white mama rabbit dead, too. Bad omen, nine dead rabbits instead of nine live ones.

  We took it hard. I can’t remember if MA was pregnant with BR or if he was already born. But I do know that one morning not long after that, MA screamed and came running in the back door of the trailer, saying that there was something in the cage with the other mama rabbit, something awful. I went out and looked and there were five little tiny pink hairless baby rabbits mewling and looking for a tit. I saw that things were going to work out and I bought a few more bucks and does so we wouldn’t be committing incest.

  Well, as these things do, it got to the uneasy stage, and I’ve written about this in some of my fiction. The rabbits grew up, and got to be eight weeks old, and it came time to knock them in the head, and butcher them. Oh, I did it. I did it for a good long while. I’d do it and try not to think too much about it. I’d use a hammer handle or something. You’d have to pick them up by the hind legs and hit them hard, and then they were just dead meat, something to be dressed, not unlike a coon or a squirrel or a deer you’d shot out in the woods. I dressed them, skinned them, cut them up and fried them, and they were sure good. All the boys at the fire station raved about how good it was whenever I fried up a big skillet of rabbit and made some gravy to go over it, but they just didn’t know what I was going through at home.

  I was seeing those little rabbits born. Children were petting them. To kill them, I’d have to pick some time when children weren’t around, and then have to tell the kids that the cage door had gotten open and they’d run away. I had to hide the evidence of my crimes, and I began to devise new ways of murdering them. Sometimes I shot them.

  Before long I began to realize that I was raising these soft gentle creatures, who had harmed no person or animal, with the express purpose of killing them, and if this continued, the blood of hundreds of animals was going to be upon my hands. In an unbelievably short amount of time, as I culled out does from litters for future brood does, they had outgrown the small hutches I’d originally built, and I was forced to move the whole tribe to an abandoned farmhouse on my father-in-law’s place, lock the door, and just dump their feed in, grab rabbits once in a while, kill them, or have them bred, bring water, sweep and pick up their shit, throw bales of hay in for them to nest in, little rabbit heads poking out of every rat hole and crevice in the house.

  But one day a day came. I was taking yet another fifty-pound bag of Purina Rabbit Chow out to the old farmhouse and I stepped inside, and there they were: little rabbits hopping all over the place. You couldn’t walk for them. They weren’t wild or frightened. I could pick up any of them. I was never once bitten. I could stroke that silky fur. And I said to myself: You cannot do this anymore. So I opened the door. Opened it wide. I started whooping, and yelling, and kicking the walls, and I ran every rabbit in that house out into the pasture, sixty-one acres of the finest pastureland in Lafayette County, a fact admitted to by my agriculture teacher and FFA advisor in high school.

  Those rabbits were brown rabbits, black rabbits, white rabbits, black-and-white rabbits with white noses, brown-and-white rabbits with white noses. I knew they’d run wild and breed with the cottontails on our place.

  I was glad to be done with it. I felt like the hit man who grows sick after too many deaths.

  Years and years later, Sam would sometimes catch a small one in the garden, bring it proudly back to me, lay it at my feet. It would look like a cottontail, but often as not it would have a white nose.

  New Year’s Day, 1989: we are called to a house just off Access Road, a cold morning, the wind bitter and freezing. We catch the plug going in and lay line far down a dirt driveway that many other houses share. The house at the end of the drive is blazing away, and maybe twenty or thirty people are standing in the yard, crying and holding on to each other. Wally and some of the other guys knock most of the fire down but there are still pockets of fire here and there. We mop up small fires, take furniture out into the yard and onto the porch, trying to salvage some of it, but the inside of the house has been demolished, complete sections of wall between rooms burned away, most of the whole rear of the house gone, smoke and fire lingering and holding in corners, licking in the rafters of the roof, smoldering behind the siding. This house is ruined. I don’t know if it can be rebuilt. I don’t know if they have insurance.

  We spend about an hour and a half there, until we’re sure everything is out, that it isn’t going to rekindle once we get back to the station. We pull everything apart that might hide fire, go through every room over and over again. There is no sense leaving if we’re going to have to come back. We’re cold and muddy, covered with ashes and soot, our faces black and grime-streaked. Wally is in charge and it’s his decision as to when to take up. Finally we get the order and we shut everything down and start draining and rolling up the muddy hose.

  It’s only as I’m nearly ready to get into Engine 4 and start backing down the driveway that I find out that this is a gathering of one family to celebrate New Year’s Day, that some of them have come from other states for this celebration. I look at the people again, their home destroyed, one child burned and gone to the hospital, all the possessions in the house ruined or saturated with smoke and water. What can anybody say to them?

  You learn early to go in low, that heat and smoke rise into the ceiling, that cooler air is near the floor. You learn to button your collar tightly around your neck, to pull the gauntlets of your gloves up over the cuffs of your coat, that embers can go anywhere skin is exposed. You learn that you are only human flesh, not Superman, and that you can burn like a candle.

  You try to go easy on the air that’s inside the tank on your back, try to be calm and not overly exert yourself, try and save some of your strength. You learn about exhaustion and giving it all you’ve got, then having to reach back and pull up some more. Suck it up and go.

  You learn eventually not to let your legs tremble when you’re pressing hard on the gas or the diesel pedal, when you’re driving into something that is unknown.

  One day if you make rank you will be promoted to driver or pump operator or lieutenant and you will discover what it feels like to roll up to a burning structure, a house that somebody lives in, or a university dormitory where hundreds of people live, or a business upon whose commerce somebody’s livelihood depends. You will change in that moment, stop being a nozzleman and become instead the operator of the apparatus the nozzlemen are pulling lines from, and you will know then that the knowledge pushed into your head at dry training sessions in the fire station must now be applied to practical use, quickly, with no mistakes, because there are men you know whose lives are going to depend on a steady supply of water, at the right pressure, for as long as it takes to put the fire out.

  And on that first time you’ll probably be like I was, scared shitless. But you can’t let that stop you from doing your job.

  You learn the difficulty of raising a ladder and pulling the rope and raising the extensions up to a second-floor window, and the difficulty of climbing that ladder with a charged inch-and-a-half line and then opening it and staying on the ladder without falling.

  You learn of ropes and safety belts, insulated gloves to move downed high-voltage lines, nozzle pressure and friction loss and the rule of thumb for a two-and-a-half-inch nozzle. You learn to check the flow pressure on a fire hydrant and what burning plastic tastes like, the way it will make you gag and cough and puke when those fumes get into your lungs and you know that something very bad has come inside your body. You see death and hear the sounds of the injur
ed. Some days you look at the fire phone and have a bad feeling, smoke more cigarettes, glance at the phone, and sometimes it rings. Sometimes you’re wrong and the night passes without trouble.

  You learn to love a job that is not like sacking groceries or working in a factory or painting houses, because everybody watches you when you come down the street. You wear a blue uniform with silver or brass or gold, and you get free day-old doughnuts from the bakery shop down the street. At Christmas people bring in pies, cakes, cookies, ham, smoked sausage, cheese, half-pints of whiskey. They thank you for your work in a season of good cheer. One freezing December night the whole department gathers with eighty steaks and Wally parks his wheeled cooker and dumps in sixty or seventy pounds of charcoal to cook them and you have drinks and play Bingo for prizes that businesses in your town have donated, a rechargeable flashlight from the auto supply, a hot-air popcorn popper from a department store, a case of beer from the grocery down the street.

  You lay out hose in the deadly summer heat on a street with no shade, hook it all up, hundreds and hundreds of feet of it, put closed nozzles on the end of the hose, and run the pressure up to three hundred psi and hold it for five minutes. If a piece bursts and creates a waterstorm on the street, you remove that section from the line and throw it away. Then you shut it down and drain it and write down the identification number of every piece of hose that survived the test and put it all back on the truck, thirteen hundred feet of it, and you make new bends and turns so the rubber coating inside it won’t kink and start to dry-rot.