On Fire Page 7
From here I can hear the coyotes screaming. They don’t do it every night, but sometimes, usually late, after eleven p.m. or so, they’ll start in. There’s a big pack of them, a dozen at least, and they’ll start howling and yipping, and all my neighbors’ dogs will get to barking, and before long it’s a hell of a racket and too loud to get any sleep.
I dug six little coyote pups out of an old culvert not a hundred yards from my house year before last. Billy Ray walked past the culvert and saw a pup stick its nose out of the culvert. He told me and I went up there and saw the same thing. It took me two days to dig them out. I could see them with a flashlight, all eyes and faces and fur, backed up in the darkness in there. The culvert was about twenty feet long, half full of dirt. It took me nearly a whole day just to chop it in two with an ax. Then I fashioned a long noose out of wire and a hoe handle and fished them out one at a time, patiently, slipping the noose over their heads, pulling them out. They never made a sound. No whine, no snarl, no growl. Absolutely silent. And when I’d finished I had six little wild things in the back of my pickup, their horrible little fangs already something to behold. They will kill and eat domestic dogs easily. For snacks. Hunting dogs. Hounds, German shepherds or poodles, doesn’t matter. I always wondered what would happen if you put a pit bull and a wild coyote in the same pen. I would not be surprised if the pit bull fared poorly. Wild is a category of its own. Wild has strength, speed, a viciousness that tame can never possess.
The little coyote pups were nice in their own way. They couldn’t have been over eight weeks old, yet they had the innate knowledge to be silent while I was roping them out. And they never offered to bite. At first I handled them with gloves, but there was no need. I’m glad to say that I didn’t kill them, that I gave them to people who wanted to try and tame them. They didn’t succeed. But we had six less coyotes in our pasture.
Sam will stand out in the yard and bark at them. But I hope he knows better than to go out there among them. He would be killed, and he would be eaten. And I would be a pretty sick boy.
I like to watch hawks. I like to watch them sail and flare over the pasture, set their wings, glide. Maybe I love them so much because they are so wild. Nothing touches a hawk, not fear, not compassion, nor weather, nor man. Man can catch them and work them, but never tame them. I love to see them sitting high in their trees with their wings folded, or galloping up on the wind until they gain enough speed to start soaring.
Around here, people used to shoot them all the time, until the government started protecting them. Now they’ve multiplied and it’s easy to watch hawks work the fields and pastures near my home. I’d turn in any sorry son of a bitch I caught shooting a hawk. I’m not saying I’d turn in somebody for shooting a doe. It’s not the same thing. I’ve shot does before, accidentally, twice. Both times there were bucks standing beside them. That shows you what a lousy shot I am. Although the meat is just as good.
Firefighters practice all the time. They’re not always sitting in the house watching S and V on HBO. They’re out in hot weather, testing their hose, laying it all out in the street with the nozzles closed and applying three hundred psi to it for five minutes to see that it won’t burst, practicing forward and reverse lays, tying knots, studying all aspects of firefighting from their manuals. They drill and train and pre-plan attack strategies for various buildings, burn down condemned buildings, trying to get ready for the real thing when it comes, because it’s going to come. They rappel off high structures, build fires in pits filled with flammable fuel, oil, Ketone, jet fuel, and then fight them. They lift weights and clean their equipment, check the pressure on their SCBAs, clean the masks, see that the regulators are functioning. They have to be as ready as they can be, but sometimes they can’t be ready enough. Eventually they will run into something that no amount of training can prepare them for, because there are situations that are not covered in the books, things they cannot read about and learn how to handle, things that must be taken care of when they are encountered, in the dead of night, when most of the town lies sleeping, or at any hour, for that matter.
It’s late, but I lie awake again in my bed at the main station, listening to the air conditioner blowing, the men snoring in the darkness around me, in total black and gloom, with the faint sound of cars passing on the street out front. A growing whine, a rising noise, the scream of tires skidding and a sudden WHUMP out there, then silence. I get out of bed quickly and run to the darkened day room, look out the window and see a car crumpled into the big oak directly across the street. I run back and turn on the lights, yell, put on my pants and boots, and some of us hurry across the street with flashlights and open the door of the car. A young man covered with blood has put his face through the windshield and then pulled it back, and he can’t talk coherently not only because he is hurt so bad but also because he’s so smashed on booze. He is trying to explain something, that this is a mistake, that he hasn’t drunk that much, and his face is a horror movie too real to watch. We lay him in the street and wait for the ambulance. He covers his bloody face with his bloody hands, and he begins to cry. Cars slow down and stop, people begin to get out to see what has happened, why we are all kneeling in the street like this.
The call comes in around one a.m. Wayne Johnson Apartments are on fire. Out of sleep and into it again, full throttle, hard as we can go. The temperature is holding around five degrees. Will and I are working out of Station No. 3 and it’s a short run, only about two blocks, and we roll up first and see in the yard a man on his back in front of the blazing apartment, fire leaping out the windows, the glass broken already, the flames lighting up the chairs and tables and cabinets melting and burning inside. The man on the ground is smoking. I don’t mean smoking a cigarette. I mean the man is smoking.
We halt in front of the apartments, and I pause just long enough to put the pump in gear and apply the parking brake, then I get out and charge the booster line so that Will can start putting water on the fire. We can hear the sirens of the other trucks screaming as they come down the street to help us. Will takes the line off the truck and hits the fire, and I run to the man who is smoking.
I check his pulse and see that he is breathing, is not obviously burned, then go back to the pumper and climb up and take a wool blanket from behind the seat and go back to the man and wrap him in it. Then I go back to the truck and call headquarters and tell them what’s happening, tell them to send an ambulance. The other trucks are in sight now, coming down the street, and I key the mike again and tell them to catch a plug on the way in and lay us a supply line. By now the fire is coming through the roof. You don’t want it through the roof. You usually lose a building when a fire goes through the roof. The men from the other stations get out of their trucks and pull off hose lines and charge them. In just a few moments the fire breaks all the way through the roof. There is now a large yellow roaring hole. We open the nozzles, put up ladders and climb them, firing water down into the gigantic flames and the water goes everywhere and lands on us and freezes on our coats and helmets and gloves. We freeze on one side, burn on the other. We are illuminated in the light from the fire, bright flames dancing on the shiny red paint of the trucks where OXFORD FIRE DEPARTMENT is written in large gold letters. We scurry around like Santa’s elves, the fire out of control, neighbors in their pajamas and housecoats and overcoats screaming for us to do something. And, well, ladies and gentlemen, looks like we’re doing about all we can do. Maybe you’d like to get up here and man a hose for a while, let me get back in the truck and warm my hands and maybe smoke a cigarette? But this one whips us. The whole roof burns off before we can get it stopped. And by then we’re so cold we don’t really give a shit.
It turns out that the smoking man is drunk, and has set the apartment on fire over drunkenness and a woman, and has been pulled out by a neighbor, also drunk. We fuck around in the five-degree weather, in the water, for about three hours, long after the smoking man has been taken to the nice warm hospital in t
he nice warm ambulance. We don’t even get our blanket back.
Lots of calls are in the middle of the night. Factory alarm systems go off. Cars burn. Fires start and go undetected because everybody is asleep. People get drunk and get in cars and hit somebody in the middle of the night. People set fires in dumpsters. In winter people try to thaw their frozen pipes with little hardware store propane torches and set their houses on fire. People put pennies behind the fuses in their fuseboxes and one night the wires can’t stand it any longer. They let the batteries play out in their smoke detectors and don’t replace them, or they spray hairspray all over their heads right beneath them, at God knows what hours, for God knows what reasons. They go off and leave chickens baking in their ovens at 450 degrees. (Nothing smells worse than a burnt chicken except a burnt human.) Gasoline tankers roll over. Cars leave the road and become airborne and center-punch trees. Old chimneys get cracks in them and fire runs between the brick and the wood. Old gas lines under houses leak, the gas pools and drifts until it finds a spark, WHOOM! People smoke in bed drunk and sober, doze off, wake to find their beds, their pajamas, and their rooms in flames. People burn their cars for insurance money, their homes for insurance money. They flush old gas from their service station tanks down the city’s sewer system so that the fumes can run up a vent inside a grocery store and find a spark and blow part of the sewer system up. They do some really dumbass things, things that make a firefighter only shake his head, like thinking you wouldn’t mind climbing an eighty-foot tree to get their cat down since you’re not doing anything at the moment.
We’re sitting in the day room of the fire station watching television one night, eating some things, drinking some coffee, talking, laughing. The fire phone rings and suddenly there is dead silence from us. Anderson, a new guy who is not from around here, picks up the fire phone and answers it, listens, smiles, then chuckles, then laughs, then hangs up the phone and continues to stare at the television.
Wally says, Well? Anderson just chuckles again. He never looks away from the television. He’s really tickled by whatever he’s just heard on the fire phone.
Some asshole on the phone, he says, still chuckling. Guy says, Ma name is Irvin Stepp and Ah live on Lizard Road and ma house is on far.
Chuckle.
Lizard Road. Like there’s some place named that.
We sit frozen for a second. Anderson giggles again. Then the rest of us leap up and run and start getting our turnouts on and cranking the trucks because we know Irvin Stepp and where his house is on Lizard Road.
The truck is loaded with sticks of pulpwood and some of them are in the road and some are scattered in the ditch and some are actually inside the cab with the man. It is afternoon, summer, and there is no urgency to our work. The truck has come to rest nose down beside a high culvert, the back wheels almost resting on the road. Most of the load has shifted forward onto the cab, crushing the seat against the steering wheel, splintering the glass, pinning the doors. The sticks are pine, a foot in diameter or less, roughly five feet in length, and they were on their way to the pulpwood yard to be measured and bought.
The highway cops try to let some of the traffic through so that it doesn’t get backed up any worse than it is. Accidents and stopped traffic on two-lane highways create other hazards, such as cars topping a hill and suddenly encountering a line of dead traffic. It makes the highway cops nervous and they try to keep the cars flowing if they can.
The ambulance is off to the side, the attendants waiting patiently with the wheeled stretcher. We are in and out of the cab with the man, trying to move things around, trying to shift some of the weight away from him. Some of the sticks are heavier than others and we move them as best we can. I am familiar with these fragrant, freshly-cut lengths of wood. They bring to mind the forest, shade, cool stands of timber, birds. Sometimes I cut pulpwood with my brother on my days off, felling the tall pines, eating lunch in the woods, sawing the trees up into five-foot lengths, hand-loading them onto my brother’s one-ton truck, a truck about like this one.
After the wood has been moved, the easiest thing, the simplest thing, since the distance between the steering wheel and the seat is only a few inches, is to take the big four-foot boltcutters and spread the jaws wide over the rim of the wheel, and, using the strength of two men, bring the handles together to snap through the plastic coating and down to the metal ring that forms the base of the steering wheel and cut it in two, in two places. That removes the pressure and the man leans forward into what is left of it. Somebody will be getting a phone call, maybe already has.
Straining, heaving, careful not to slip against jagged metal or glass while working against the difficult slope of the ditch, we bring him out, the broken bone ends gently grating together, holding him hugged tightly to us, and we lay him in the short grass that borders the hot asphalt.
The public, as usual, is gathered to see, silent now, watchful, reverent for once in the face of death.
I try not to look at him but I do. As quickly as possible, we cover him with a sheet, because it is not decent to leave him exposed for all the world to see.
The eighteen-wheeler that pulled out in front of him idles on the left side of the highway, the driver shaken, crying, nauseated by what he has caused, realizing better than anybody on the scene the difficulty of stopping a loaded truck on a downhill grade.
The attendants come over with the stretcher and position it beside the white-wrapped bundle. All of us are sweating in the heat. The people stand watching, but I do not meet their eyes. I bend over the body and tuck the sheet around it tighter and then we bend and encircle him with our arms, four or five of us. It takes that many of us because he is so incredibly broken up, and we have to try to preserve a little of his human dignity.
The highway cops keep motioning for the cars to move through as we load him onto the stretcher. All faces look out windows as they creep by. The highway cops have sweated through their shirts. They want us to hurry up and get it over with.
The back doors of the ambulance are open and there is a chrome rail bolted to the floor of the ambulance and a locking jaw on the side of it. We lift the stretcher, push it into the back of the ambulance until it hits the channel that locks it straight, push it back, and then release it.
The doors slam shut. Both of the attendants will ride in front this trip. They get in, the front doors slam shut. The red light is on but they won’t run the siren back to town. A radio squawks and we hear the transmission shift into gear. The cops wave goodbye to the attendants. The ambulance pulls off.
The cars continue to creep through, but soon the debris will be removed, thanks to us, and traffic will resume fifty-five miles per hour. The wrecker is approaching. We take off our gloves and one of my partners, who will die in an accident years later, opens the nozzle and drinks from the booster line. The water tank on the truck contains Tank-Savr, a rust inhibitor.
I tell him not to drink it, that it might kill him.
Screaming-ass burnout from Station No. 2, trailer fire at three-way intersection, lunch time, lunch on the table, rain, the road wet, be careful, watch it going around the curves. The trailer appears to be about half-destroyed when we get there (they always are), but our motivated nozzlemen knock the fire down and soon we’re walking around inside, nobody killed, nobody burned, a family homeless for sure, though, and here’s a dead puppy in the floor, a little brown thing, so sad, somebody’s pet, I bet. Rick and Rob pick up the little wet dead animal and bring him outside to the scant light coming from the sky and we look at his eyes, glazed over, the evacuation of his bowels, sure signs of death, all right, but our van is there with the power saws and the halogen lights and the ropes and rappelling gear and the oxygen and Rick says, Let’s give him a shot.
A couple of people light cigarettes, shake their heads, Shit, that fucking dog’s dead, Rick, but he and Rob get the oxygen cylinder out and crack the valve open and slide the tube into the puppy’s mouth and leave it in for a little bit
and the glaze starts to come off his eyes. Hey, check this, we say, and gather around. His ribs rise and fall one time. Big Rick sits there on the linoleum in the floor of the van, cradling the puppy on his lap, stroking him a little, still wearing his turnouts and his OFD cap, and the puppy makes some noise halfway between a bark and a yelp, blows smoke out like he’s been enjoying a Marlboro, then takes another breath. Dead, huh? Rick says, and a little crowd starts to form. Rob sits there grinning and chewing his gum. He was going fishing but then it rained and then this happened. Pretty soon the puppy’s making all kinds of yelping noises and trying to raise his head, howling like the oldest ghost in the world, and we figure he’s reliving the fire.
You done come back to the world, boy, we tell him.
Poot Man and I are standing at the window of Fire Station No. 3 one pretty Sunday morning and see a young man without a shirt walking down the side of the bridge that faces the station. The young man is jumping and waving his arms, shouting. I open the window and as he gets closer it’s easy to hear that he’s screaming about nine hundred kinds of motherfuckers! into the peaceful, church-worshipping, happy spring morning. What’s the matter with that fucker? Poot Man wants to know. I believe the sumbitch is crazy, I say. We watch him come closer, and he picks up a Coke bottle off the road. A car with two boys in it pulls up at the stop sign by the station, directly across from the young man now armed with a Coke bottle.