On Fire Read online

  I scooped him up in a dustpan and carried him outside so the dogs or the cats could eat him. I checked his balls. They were pretty big. No telling how many mice he’d have fathered in my house. I’d seen baby ones before, little pink naked mewling ones my mother-in-law found living in her cedar chest one time. I threw them over the fence. I guess mice have a hard time of it.

  I threw this one out on the carport and looked at him, dead, wanting to live. I could hardly get over it. It made me uneasy for a long time.

  It was a lovely summer afternoon, about three or four in the afternoon, and the line of stopped cars we had been passing for the last two miles made a steady rushing sound in the windows of the fire truck, and the wreck was below us, finally in sight, about a mile away, at the bottom of a very steep hill we were going down, and we were doing sixty-five, and we had no brakes.

  Uncle Bunky and I had already braced ourselves to be killed. I felt fairly sure that we were going to die, and the only thing I was wondering was how many of the people who had driven the Highway Patrol cars and the ambulances at the bottom of the hill where the wreck was were going to die, too, when we slammed into them, at sixty-five. The truck I was driving weighed many tons, and it carried 750 gallons of water that weighed eight pounds per gallon, and I knew that the brake shoes had “faded away” from the drums from the repeated use of them, and I was bearing down on the brake pedal with everything I had and the truck wasn’t slowing down any. Down below us, there was a whole crowd of flashing blue and red lights and stopped traffic stretching away on the other side as far as the eye could see. A truck was overturned in the middle of the road, and I told Unkie that we weren’t going to make it. Looking back, I guess I should have been talking to Jesus instead of him.

  Like I said earlier, it was a fine summer afternoon, but I never believed all that Indian shit about it being a good day to die. I did not want to slam into that group of emergency vehicles. I pumped the pedal and it didn’t give anything back. I downshifted and the sound of the stopped cars kept rushing in the windows. We had already driven nearly twenty miles to this wreck, passing cars, hogging the road, running people off the road, and I had come upon it a little too fast, not knowing exactly where it was, just on Highway 30. I told Unkie that I thought the only chance we had was to pull the MicoBrake just before we got there, which would lock all the tires down if there was anything left. I kept downshifting, trying to slow down, pumping the brake. It still didn’t feel like I had anything, and suddenly I was given a miracle, because the pedal had something under it, and we slowed down some and I down shifted some more and we swung in nonchalantly beside the wreck and parked without telling any of the assembled rescue people how close they had come to another disaster.

  You never know what to expect. You just get out and deal with whatever they have called you to. You are the professional, that is your job. You hold the answers in your hands and your mind. There is always a victim to be extricated on a call like this, sometimes a crushed and dying person whose life may depend on what you do and how you do it. What we were looking at that day was a dump truck that had been carrying a load of lime. It had swerved to miss an oncoming car, and the truck had flipped. There were several tons of lime on the road. The trailer was on its side, but the frame had twisted and the cab was upside down with the roof resting on the highway centerline. The driver had come out with the windshield. His wife, or his woman, or whatever she was to him, was inside the cab, underneath all that iron and steel.

  Most wreck victims are in shock when you get there. They’re walking around in a daze, or lying on the side of the road with a blanket over them if somebody is there who knows how to treat for shock and thinks to do it. This man, a middle-aged black man, was in shock, and up and walking around. I could see the woman through the large hole where the windshield had been. She had on a red shirt and a pair of blue jeans. There were a whole lot of people standing around watching. There always is. I dropped down on my belly in the broken glass and diesel fuel and crawled under the truck with her. I dreaded seeing what I would find.

  She was a young woman, probably less than thirty. She was flat on her back on the roof, and her main problem was that she was caught by the dash in the one place a lady surely ought not to be caught, and pinned effectively with her legs on either side of the sharp ridge of the dash. She had a broken nose, and aside from that, and aside from being terrified, she seemed to be all right.

  I talked to her and told her that we were going to get her out. I held her hand. She gripped my hand with a strength born out of fear. I told her that I had to feel of her, that I had to check for broken bones, for her to please not think anything about it, that I was a firefighter, that I was trained in my job and that I had to check for what injuries she might have. She squeezed my hand and told me that she understood. She said, Don’t leave me. I said, I won’t.

  How would I have been if I had been in her place? A truck upside down on top of me after that awful thing happened? She was pretty cool. I checked her legs and arms. Nothing seemed to be broken. I asked her if she had any internal pain. She said nothing was hurting her but her nose. And this other, she said. I kept holding her hand. I told her that help was on the way, but that was a lie. Sometimes you have to lie to them to make them stop believing that they’re going to die. I knew we hadn’t brought a damn thing with us that could lift that truck off her. So we just lay under there at first and talked. She told me what had happened, how the wreck had happened, how it had happened so fast. It was very hot, and we were both sweating. I could see the faces of nurses and ambulance attendants peering in the broken windows at us.

  What we needed was a crane, but we didn’t have one on Engine 8. I told her that I had to leave for a few minutes, but that I’d be right back. I crawled out from under the truck and stood up. Traffic was completely blocked for miles each way. I called Unkie over to the side and told him that her ladyhood was caught tight and that we were going to have to jack up the truck or something. I asked him what he wanted to do. He was the shift chief, I was just a lieutenant. We had a small hydraulic extrication device called a Ram Tool and he said he guessed we’d better get it out of the truck.

  I got it out and set it up under the wreck and all it did was blow a gasket. There was more weight than the little hydraulic piston could move. The woman kept looking at me with those eyes while I lay next to her and jacked the handle of the Ram Tool until it blew the gasket. I lit a cigarette and she asked me for one. She wanted to know first if it was dangerous to smoke under there. I told her that diesel fuel had a low flash point. I stayed under there and we smoked a cigarette apiece.

  I said, Listen. I’m going to try and move you. I told her I didn’t think her hip was broken. She said she didn’t think her hip was broken, either. I told her that I was going to try and slide her out from under that dash. I told her that if it started hurting her, for her to tell me. She said she would.

  I tried and tried. I hooked my hands in her belt loops and pulled and pulled, but there was no moving her. She was stuck tight, and embarrassed, and she giggled a little, maybe from shock, maybe from this white boy lying under a smashed truck with her trying to get her vagina unhung. Mutually we decided that we weren’t doing her any good. When I crawled back out that time, I figured traffic was backed up all the way to the Union County line.

  Miracles happen sometimes. We’d already had one, so I never expected two. A convoy of National Guard trucks was backed up somewhere in the line, and one of them had a crane. The Highway Patrol brought them up and into position and they parked next to the wreck. I crawled back under there with her and told her what was about to happen, that they were going to wrap a steel cable around the cab of the truck and tighten it up slowly and that I was going to hold onto her and slide her out the second the pressure lifted. I think she dreaded that. I think maybe she thought they might lift it a few inches and then drop it back down on her and crush her. I didn’t tell her that I was afraid that might happen
, too. The cable came in, and I passed it around the body of the truck, and sent the hook back out, and they tightened it. We didn’t say anything. The cable creaked. The truck shifted. She squeezed my hand. There was the groaning of metal. The dash slowly lifted and I grabbed her belt loops in my hands and slid her backwards, and suddenly many hands reached in and caught her with me and we pulled her out onto the highway and she was free.

  We stood around for a while. They attended to her and she was able to stand. She was crying, but from happiness, glad to be alive, and she came over to me, this young woman who had lived and not died, and she put her arms around me, and she hugged me. I think maybe now that there was even a gentle kiss on my cheek. I know that she stood off from me for a second, just before she climbed into the ambulance, with her arms on my shoulders, and looked at me. Then they took her away.

  Unkie came over and said, You did good, Brown.

  My dog, Sam, sometimes makes mistakes. He once dove off a sixty-foot bridge into a river because he thought there was some ground on the other side of the railing. He looked very foolish from where I was standing, down on the river bank, sixty feet below, his eyes moving left and right in bewilderment as he fell, his legs dogpaddling the sky. It was a mere stroke of luck that he wasn’t killed instantly by landing on the bank. The river was low and only about ten feet wide that day, but he hit right in the middle of it, swam over to me, puked a couple of times, and then he was all right.

  He’s short, sleek black, half Welsh corgi and half black-and-tan feist. He’s supposed to be a squirrel dog. He’s a sexual virgin and has a look of intelligence with his upright pointed ears that lies. He’s terrified of thunder and lightning, will crawl up in your lap and cry over it, but will fight and kill snakes and rats. He’s an excellent mole dog.

  I had another dog a while back that came into heat, and even though I wanted Sam to get her pregnant and make some more like him, he couldn’t do it. He thought it was on the outside of her left rear leg, and he hunched on that until he almost dislocated her leg. He ran her completely off. I can’t find her, and I haven’t seen any buzzards circling.

  We have a lot of fun with him and one of the things we do to him is pick up Pooch, our other dog, a white beagle, and hug him and push Sam back, and before long he’ll perform these incredible leaps four feet off the ground, snapping at Pooch’s balls, and crying all the time. It’s really enlightening to watch it and wonder about the emotions of dogs. It’s pure jealousy, and you wouldn’t think a dog would know jealousy. It opens up other ramifications, like, do they know heartbreak? And loneliness? And angst? I think they do. I think they know fear and greed and love, impatience and uncertainty.

  These are just some of my random thoughts on dogs.

  I retired back in January. And this is September. The Season of the Dove has already been upon us for several weeks now. You can get your driver’s license in Mississippi when you turn fifteen, so Billy Ray can go hunting whenever he wants to in my little brown truck. Shane is eleven and wanted me to take him out to shoot at some doves. He didn’t have any shells, so I went to town and got him some at the pawn shop one day, but ended up paying $150 for a used Fender electric guitar before I could get out of there. That afternoon we went over to a soybean field right across the creek from our house, almost our back yard, and sat down in a row with the green plants right in front of our faces, but only four doves flew over and we missed every one. I don’t hunt like I used to.

  Things have changed some. Pooch, our little white beagle, got killed. Somebody ran over him down on the highway. So now I make Billy Ray lock Sam in the utility room with the deep freeze and all my tools whenever he takes off on the four-wheeler for the river bottom. We don’t want anything happening to Sam. We’ve still got high hopes of getting some puppies out of him if we can ever figure out a way. His legs are short, for one thing, and that gives him some trouble mounting up, so to speak, but I think personally that it’s unnatural for a male dog not to know where a female dog’s thing is. And I don’t know if a vet can artificially inseminate a dog or not. I know they can do it with horses and cows, but I don’t know how they’d extract the semen, unless you could get him to have a wet dream. I do know for a fact that Sam had a wet dream on top of Billy Ray’s bed the other day, around the middle of the afternoon. Mary Annie—I didn’t see it personally—said he was asleep, and jerked and whined for a long time, and then ejaculated. She thought it was about the cutest thing she’d ever seen. I wished he’d had it stuck in something that would have done all of us some good.

  I took him to Ireland’s when he was about six inches long. I didn’t tell anybody I was taking him to town and Mary Annie (MA from here on out) looked all over the place for him. I had him buttoned up inside my shirt with just his little black head sticking out, and I’d go sneaking up behind girls, with a beer in my hand, rubbing his cold little nose on their bare arms to give them sort of a goose. He’s been like one of my kids ever since.

  I suppose I could go back and rehash some old fires, exciting things that happened. That happened, and a lot of boring things happened. A firefighter has to face boredom as well as danger. There are all sorts of other things that happen, stuff you wouldn’t think about, like club ladies in town who suddenly decide that the fire stations ought to have flowers and shrubs planted all over everywhere, who then call up either Uncle Chiefy or the mayor, and the end result is that the firefighters have to get out and plant flowers and shrubs when they could be inside catching some S and V on HBO or Cinemax. Another bad thing about the fire service is that you have to see dead people, burnt-up people, and people who have died of smoke inhalation and people in car crashes who are already dead or who are dying in cars you’re trying to take apart with the Hurst Tool while about fifty other people stand around and watch you and offer advice. I never dealt with it very well. I was never able to close my eyes and go to sleep after something like that, not any time soon after.

  One of the reasons I liked being a firefighter was that I always had the feeling that I was helping people. I don’t mean like helping get a cat out of a tree or anything. I mean like stopping somebody’s house fire, where they were going to lose all their possessions, all their pictures, things that couldn’t be replaced. A fire in a house is an awful thing to see. What the heat does to the things in that house is incredible. You can have a fire in the back of a house and it will melt a telephone in the front. Fire does strange things. A fire can kill you without ever touching you. It can raise the temperature of the air inside a building to a superheated level that will be fatal on the intake of the first breath. Most people who die in fires don’t burn to death; they die from smoke inhalation that kills the respiratory system. That’s why the fire service is always going on and on about smoke detectors. These little ten-dollar gadgets are one of the truly wonderful inventions of man. They’ll wake you up from a deep slumber so that you and your family and your dog or cat or whatever can get out of the house in time to live and call the fire department. If this sounds like a public service announcement, it is. If you don’t have one, buy one today. They make great Christmas gifts. Plus they’re cheap. Give a gift of love to a loved one you love. End of announcement.