On Fire Read online

  The rig weighs between thirty and forty pounds. It will give you about twenty minutes of air if you’re lying flat on your back breathing through the respirator; that’s if you’re not exerting yourself. When five minutes of air is left, a little bell mounted on the tank will start ringing, loud and insistently, driven by the declining air pressure. With experience you learn to leave the mask off until you’re ready to enter your dangerous atmosphere. They work just like a diver’s rig, but the mask and mouthpiece are all molded together, so that the mask covers your whole face. They’re called SCBA, self-contained breathing apparatus. You can enter a poisonous atmosphere, live in a superheated temperature if the rest of your body can stand it. The main purpose is to prevent the firefighter from breathing smoke.

  We were already a little winded by the time we got to the top floor. As soon as we stepped into the hall, we were enveloped in heavy black smoke. It was bad enough to put the masks on. An initial search revealed nothing but more smoke and nearly zero visibility. Things were much worse than they appeared from outside, certainly. I got worried when I saw that it was impossible to see my partners’ flashlight beams if they were over three or four feet away. I got everybody back together and told them to go back outside. I didn’t want anybody getting separated from the group and getting lost in the smoke. We hadn’t had time to bring in any safety lines or anything like that yet. It was still very early. No tactical decisions had been made. We went back down for fresh tanks and more men. I knew by then I wouldn’t be getting back to those ribs any time soon.

  I reported what we’d found up there: bad conditions, heavy smoke, zero visibility, no flame found yet. The ladder was operating by then and more off-duty people had arrived. Most of the people on my shift were there, including my boss, who took charge of the ladder. My two duty partners were there, getting their turnouts on, getting ready to go up. I got another tank and climbed on the ladder platform and caught a ride to the roof. There was a wide ledge, maybe twelve feet or so, outside the fifth floor. The captain of the shift on duty got off on the ledge and the rest of us went on to the roof. My boss let us off and went back down for more men and equipment. His steady, up-and-down trips, five stories high, ferrying people and supplies, would go on unceasingly for the next few hours.

  The fire needed to be ventilated—that is, an opening of some sort made in the building to let the buildup of heat and smoke out, to improve visibility conditions so the fire could be located and attacked. It was a long time before that happened.

  We started another search of the fifth floor. We appeared to be in a hall that was built in a large rectangle with numerous doors that opened into offices. What we didn’t know was that the fire was in the very center of the building, in a lounge area that had only two doors. We wasted an enormous amount of time checking for fire in the outlying offices, working by feel and touch in a place that was solid black to the eye, a place growing uncomfortably hot. We had a bad fire, it was rapidly worsening, and we didn’t have it located, although we were searching as diligently as we could. Bells started ringing on the tanks, and I realized that it might be possible for some of us to become disoriented in the smoke, run out of air, and have to pull the mask off, and maybe never make it back to safety and fresh air. We went back outside to count heads and then we climbed on up to the roof.

  An entry saw with a gasoline engine had been sent up in case we decided to cut a hole in the roof, but the roof was constructed of gravel over tar paper over concrete. Something else had to be done, something quick. The smoke had to be let out of the building right away, before a bad fire got any worse, before the heat intensified any more. The only thing we saw was the windows.

  More people had come up, along with hoses and nozzles and ropes and more airpacks. I went over to the ladder and told my boss about the conditions, that it was evidently a bad fire and getting worse, and that we were going to have to break some windows on the fifth floor. He listened and nodded, and went down for tools.

  I don’t know what all happened then. Adrenaline. The next major event was the arrival via the ladder of two men with a fire ax and a heavy pry bar. I got back on the ladder platform and went with them down to the fifth-floor ledge and we walked to the corner window, a huge pane of dark glass that looked very expensive. Hundreds of people were standing below on the ground. Red and blue lights were flashing everywhere down there. The ladder was running at a high throttle, and hoses had been laid from the pumpers to the building so that we could boost the water pressure inside the standpipe system. I took a deep breath and swung the heavy pry bar as hard as I could at the window. It bounced off.

  I braced my feet, tightened my helmet strap, turned the point of the tool to the glass and tried my best to shatter it. It bounced off.

  I’m no ball player, never have been. But I brought the heavy bar around from behind my back with both hands gripping it like a baseball bat and delivered all the weight of it to the center of the window and it caved in in large jagged pieces. We were immediately engulfed in a roar of dense black smoke that barreled out over us so heavily that we had to move out of it and go on to the next window. People on the ground were yelling.

  We eventually broke nine windows in a row all down that side of the fifth floor, walking down the ledge, swinging the pry bar in, knocking the sharp edges of glass out of the casement. More men were delivered to the ledge and we established our entry and exit route: through a window halfway down the side, step down into a nicely upholstered Law School dean’s desk chair, walk across his desk and papers, drop onto the floor, try to find the fire. I think we knocked a lot of things over. A forward command post was set up on the ledge, and the captain relayed his orders for men and equipment via walkie-talkie back to the assistant chief, who directed the ground operations from the parking lot.

  That trip I went in without a mask, because the smoke was lifting a little, even though the temperature seemed to have increased. I knew that was because the fire was getting a fresh supply of oxygen, but that’s something you have to deal with when you ventilate. If you can go on in and make your stop, it doesn’t make a shit.

  Our pumpers were feeding the standpipe system, and we got the little piss-ant hose off the rack and stretched out the line. We thought the fire was right in front of us, and we were going to crawl our way up to it and find it and fight it. But we couldn’t get the valve turned on. We tried and tried and even hammered on it with spanner wrenches, but we couldn’t get it to open. We sent somebody out for a pipe wrench and then got it turned on, but blew the hose completely out of the coupling from the tremendous pressure our pump operators were sending through the pipe.

  It took a little while to shut it off, take off the burst hose, and put our own nozzles and hose on it. But when we had that done, we put on fresh tanks and went down the hall in a group, close to the floor. We knew where it was now, back there in that lounge.

  The air was burning our ears, even down that low. All of us crawling and sliding in the water, going inside a door where the thing was feeding and getting bigger. That is a special place to be in, with men in a burning building, where you can only barely hear one another talking behind the masks, where the glow of the fire makes a light on the masks around you, where you are all panting and pulling on the hose and trying to be as small and concentrated as possible, trying to do the job. Sometimes you reach a stage of near exhaustion after only a few minutes.

  All we could see was a hellish red light in front of us somewhere. But we could hear the damn thing. Everything around us was charred, the water we were crawling in was black and hot, and the only smell was that of heavy smoke. My partners had the nozzle and I had my hand on their shoulders and we were inching forward, spraying water. We slipped on the tiles until we got to the carpet and then we pushed close to the fire, to that awful heat, until it came through our turnouts and our gloves and into our knees where we knelt in the hot water. Another bell started ringing and I hollered for whoever it was to get out. Somebo
dy left and somebody came in on the line to replace him. We kept pushing forward, yelling, urging each other on.

  You have to meet the thing is what it is. You have to do something in your life that is honorable and not cowardly if you are able to live in peace with yourself, and for the firefighter it is fire. It has to be faced and defeated so that you prove to yourself that you meet the measure of the job. You cannot turn your back on it, as much as you would like to be in cooler air, as much as you would like to breathe it. You have to stay huddled with the men you are with.

  We whipped that fire’s ass. It fought back, leaping and dodging the water, but we kept the nozzle open and on fog and rotated it in a counterclockwise manner due to the rotation and curvature of the earth, and the water was dispersed into tiny droplets by the turbojet nozzle. The droplets were converted into steam by the heat of the fire and steam is what put the fire out.

  We pulled back for a breather and more people came in to mop up small fires and start salvage and overhaul.

  In the Law School dean’s office I saw my partners with sootstreaked faces, exhausted beer-drinking buddies with their coats open, lying on shards of glass in the floor with cigarettes in their hands. There was an unbelievable amount of talking and confusion. I lit my own cigarette, went back across the man’s nice desk and out on the ledge, and told them we’d knocked it down.

  It isn’t until later that the real exhaustion sets in. They sent up some cold Gatorade that was delivered while the overhaul went on, while more men, fresh men, came up, while they ferried empty air tanks back and forth to Station One for refilling at the compressor, while men worked at the station filling the tanks, while the pump operators watched the gauges and engine temperatures, while the people in charge oversaw everything from outside and talked on their walkie-talkies, while the dispatcher manned the radio, while my boss carried the platform of the ladder up and down, over and over.

  I sat down on the floor and smoked a cigarette and drank some Gatorade. We all looked at each other and just shook our heads.

  Later we were told that it looked like a black tornado had come out of the building when we broke the first window, and that a man from the university’s physical plant department had started tearing at his hair when we started breaking the windows because they cost $1,500 apiece.

  Well, yeah. But it got the smoke out. Their fireproof building didn’t burn down. And we were all still alive when it was over.

  Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Off duty. How sweet it is. I’m in the process of building a patio, twelve feet by twenty-four feet, hand-laid brick with a roof over it. I’m laying a herringbone pattern, just like the one in the sidewalk in front of William Faulkner’s house. I’ve been in this process for about four weeks. I foolishly thought it would only take five or six weeks, and now I see that it’s going to take about sixteen or eighteen. Dove season will be open before I’m done.

  It would be hard to explain how happy I am when I’m off duty. I’m so happy when I’m off duty, I could just lie down in the carport and kick and scream. But I don’t do it. I have this room out here, on the other side of the carport, and when I’m off duty I’m able to go into this other room, which is actually another world, and write. I’m able to shuck off the other part of me and do this thing I have to do in this room I built just for myself. Or, I can say poot on it and build a patio.

  I have children. Billy Ray, fourteen. Shane, ten. LeAnne, seven. Delinah would have been twelve now. There was also a miscarriage way back. Mary Annie put the tiny fetus in a clean margarine bowl and took it to the hospital with her.

  We’ve had no greater share of hard troubles than other people I know.

  We finally have our own house. We built it a few years ago, because we couldn’t live in the house with Mary Annie’s mother anymore, because it all came down to my writing, which I couldn’t do over there, across the driveway. When her daddy, Preston, or Topknot, as everybody called him, died many years ago, everybody said the right thing to do was move in with her mother and take care of her and her mother, Pat, and I listened to the people who said those things and even believed them, being young and naive and not knowing that a man and his wife needed to form their own life together, since that’s usually the plan, and it took some years and some heartbreak to find out moving in with Mary Annie’s mother was not the right thing to do.

  I left one time, stayed four days with a friend I worked for on my off days setting out baby pine trees. I had been out one night, drinking, and Mary Annie had cooked a supper for me that I hadn’t been there to eat. Later on, when I finally came in, and had fixed my plate and was about to carry it out to the living room, words were said. I had told her I’d be home in time for supper. She was hot over my going out drinking instead. I said something smart and she doubled up her little fist and caught me square in the jaw with a decent right hook. It didn’t hurt that bad. I’ve been hit by marines and sailors much harder, but of course I dropped my plate on the floor, food everywhere, gravy, all that. I told her I’d be packing my shit immediately, which I did. There was one brief and insane struggle over a .22 rifle. I took all the bullets away from her. Shane was a fat little baby, black-headed and born mad at the world, crying every night all night long. Our lives were not easy then.

  Four days were all I could stay away from them. I crawled back in the window one night and I’ve been with them ever since.

  I’ve just been out in the gloam with my cousin. We’ve been riding around drinking a few beers, what my mama used to call “acting ugly.” If you don’t know what the gloam is, you can find out by reading some James Street. He’s a Mississippi writer who’s been dead for a long time, but he knew what it felt like when the sun went down and left about an hour of light before dark. It’s the very best time to ride around and listen to some music. Run over snakes. We try to do it several times a week in the summer. A man’s got to have a bro to run with sometimes.

  If I go to a bar, Ireland’s is the bar I go to. On a really lively night you’ll see drunk women falling down, fights and potential fights, sweet young things and big-butted women, cowboys and construction workers and firefighters. I probably spend more time at Ireland’s than I should. I live out in the county, out here in the land of the Big Sky country. I live at the edge of a river bottom, and the clouds can go all mushroomy and marshmallowy late in the afternoon and loom up big and white in the sky so that they can capture your attention. We have our own catfish pond, and we feed our fish. Billy Ray does.

  He got a little red wagon for his first Christmas. The first time I pulled him in it, I pulled it too fast—he couldn’t even crawl yet—and flipped him backwards out of it on his head. I thought I’d killed him. I nearly killed Shane, too. I was bringing some firewood into the house one night and he was right between my legs holding onto me and jabbering and all. He was only about eighteen months old. The stick of wood weighed about fifteen pounds. And I dropped it right on top of his head. I don’t know how it kept from killing him. You get these babies, these little miracles, and then you do something stupid that nearly kills them. You think, Jesus, kid, you need somebody better than me to take care of you.

  There are a lot of cows out in the pasture. It’s pleasurable to sit out there on the partly finished patio and watch them grazing around on the green grass and all. It’s pretty motivating. When you get that peace and tranquillity locked into you, anything is possible. We fish in the river. We live a life in harmony with nature and are glad we’re here. I think it’s a pretty wonderful life, what I’ve undertaken here. Spend time with my firefighting buddies for twenty-four hours and then come home and spend more time with my family for forty-eight hours and then turn around and do it all over again. My life is in cycles. I don’t know what it would be if it wasn’t.

  I’ve skipped a day of duty, which is pretty good when you can do it. I’d probably skip every day of duty if I could. I’d lie around here and write and work on my patio all the time if I could. I want to be
through with it before fall if I can. It took two solid weeks just to shovel the dirt out of it. LeAnne came out one day and said why didn’t I just dig it a little deeper and make a swimming pool out of it? Some day some little boy’s going to look at her bottom in a pair of blue jeans and come over here to take her out and I’m going to get him down in the kitchen floor and just beat the shit out of him.

  I’ve been cleaning out my writing room and I’ve got lots of problems with insects. We’ve got spiders around here like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve murdered thousands of the unhatched little mothers in the last few days. It’s like Spider Heaven over here. Also Mouse Heaven. I think it comes from building a house in a pasture. The first year it was Tick Heaven, until I got some Dursban and went to murdering millions. We had them crawling in the windows, clambering over the carpet, clinging all over the furniture. We were afraid we were going to have to burn the house down just to get rid of them. It made us feel like inferior people, although we knew it wasn’t our fault. When company was over we’d be shifting our eyes around, looking to see if one was walking. We didn’t want them sucking on our guests.

  I had a fight with a mouse a while back. I was sitting in the living room late one night, listening to the stereo, and I saw a mouse run from the living room closet to the bathroom. I knew I had him hemmed up. There’s only one way out of the bathroom. I got the broom and went in there and shut the door, and sure enough, there he was, trying to decide which way to run. He ran up under the vanity and I stabbed at him a couple of times with the broom, and then he quickly hid under a pile of towels in the corner. I beat the shit out of that pile of towels, and he ran out, started trying to climb the wall in the corner. And then the little bastard turned and attacked me! He was leaping in the air, squealing. I swung at him but I missed each time. I started getting a little panicky. I whomped the carpet behind him as he ran to the back part of the bathroom, him hopping and leaping, both of us excited, him for his life, me just to rid my house of vermin. I was determined to get him. He cunningly hid behind the commode and I eased over into the bathtub and started whipping the hell out of him, poking him, and he went crazy and darted out from there. I chased him back into the front part of the bathroom and he hid in the pile of towels again. I beat on it and beat on it and beat on it, and finally he ran out and tried to find a place to hide. I poked and stabbed and really got pretty excited. I started breathing hard and I know my blood pressure went up. He ran out of the corner and into another corner and tried to sneak past me in the wide open. I swung at him and he attacked me again! I had to retreat, and I climbed up on top of the vanity that time. I tried to whip the hell out of him from up there, but he ran back into the rear part of the bathroom again. I gave him a little time. Everything was quiet. Both of us waiting. I knew he knew he was fixing to get killed. I really hated it, but I just couldn’t let him go. He’d breed others, and they’d run wild all over the house. I poked my nose around the corner. He was hiding behind the commode again, just his nose sticking out, looking and listening for me. I got in the bathtub again and started jabbing him. He ran out and got back into the front part of the bathroom again. He had little shiny black eyes. Everybody else in the house was asleep and didn’t know what I was going through, trying to murder one mouse. He dove into that pile of towels again and I whipped the hell out of it again for a while, and when he finally ran, I dragged all that stuff out of the corner so he couldn’t hide in there again. I was planning my strategy, see. Not giving the enemy any place to hide. Sweep and destroy. He went back to the corner again and I flogged futilely at him when he ran by and went back behind the commode. I was getting a little tired of him not giving up. I saw that he wasn’t going to just let me kill him, that he was going to fight for his life. I stepped back into the bathtub. I felt pretty ridiculous. Real ridiculous. If I’d had a BB gun I’d have just shot him, like Daddy used to do them in the kitchen when I was a kid. I knew that he was leaping toward me just out of desperation, like when the bear turns on the dogs at the brushpile. I poked and jabbed some more and got him to run. He was trying to climb into the cabinets, but they’re new and tight, and he couldn’t get inside. Finally I whopped him one good hard one, and he kicked backwards and fell out in the floor jerking. I laid it on him then, just beat the crap out of him. He kept trying to get up and run. I couldn’t see how something so little could have so much heart, and I felt sort of cowardly. He put up a pretty good fight for a mouse. I was breathing really hard by then. I couldn’t believe it. I almost thought I was going to have a stroke. Over one little mouse. When he stopped moving, I stopped hitting him.