3000 Degrees (6 page)

His father nodded patiently, the way men do when they're being lectured by the children they've raised. But he kept his word. Two days later, just after six o'clock in the evening, he turned off the interstate in Maryland, looking for a hotel he used to stay in with his wife before she died. He made a couple of wrong turns, took his eye off the road, and drove into the back end of a tractor trailer. He died instantly.

Mike had to tell two of his three sisters. Hardest calls he'd ever made, his fingers trembling when he dialed, his voice weak, cracking when he said the words. He tried not to dwell on it, usually didn't. But the anniversary was tough.

He passed behind Engine 1 and veered sharply to the right, aiming for the coffeepot. At the table, sitting on the mismatched chairs, he saw Jerry Lucey and Craig Boisvert. He knew them well enough to recognize their faces, remember their names. Craig was fairly new, only a couple years on the job, and assigned to a different tour group. Promising kid. Jerry was more familiar. He worked on the HazMat team with Mike, but unless a tanker flipped on I-290 or a chlorine tank sprung a leak, he didn't see him much. Mike knew his reputation, though. Driven, aggressive, one of those guys who was born with soot in his blood, a fireman long before he ever took the test or drove an engine or climbed a ladder. Jerry wanted the job so bad that he quit driving a truck for Coca-Cola and took a seat among the doomed recruits of 1991; the city had already announced layoffs for the following year. Last in, first out, which meant Jerry and the rest of the recruits would be laid off as soon as they finished their training. He stuck it out for a year, supporting his wife and two boys with odd jobs, until he was recalled in July 1992. Nine months later, he was riding Rescue 1. A rookie working rescue was unheard of, but Jerry wanted it so bad, drove so hard, the captain took him on anyway. Now a seven-year veteran, he taught at the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy, marched in the color guard.

“A fireman's fireman,” the other guys said about Jerry. “A
good
fireman,” the highest compliment anyone could ever hear in the station. Oh, there might be slightly more effusive praise. If, say, a man snatched a baby from a melting crib, he might have been told “Good save.” But only in a gruff mumble. Firemen were low-key with praise, reflexively averse to fawning, which was fine since most of them tended toward humility, almost as if they feared taunting the fire gods with any giddy display of bravado. Better to do the job quietly, professionally.

“Hello, gentlemen,” Mike said as he passed. “So, who are you two supposed to be tonight?”

“I swapped on for John King,” Jerry said.

“And I'm in for Gary Williams,” Craig said.

Mike nodded, pulled a Styrofoam cup from the stack, lifted the black lever on the silver pot.

“Uh, Chief?”

Mike looked over his shoulder. Jerry was talking. Except for his slightly elfin ears, he bore a striking resemblance to Tom Hanks, or what Hanks would look like after the wardrobe and makeup people got him ready to walk onto a firehouse set: dark Celtic eyes and jet-black hair, a thick, almost Victorian, mustache.

“Would you mind if we worked our own trucks?”

Mike stared at them blankly. He aligned their faces with their trucks, Jerry on the rescue, Craig on the engine. “Why would we want to do that?” he deadpanned. “That makes sense.” He waited for a laugh, or at least a chuckle. Jerry and Craig looked at him, as though they weren't sure if the chief was serious. “Yeah, of course,” Mike said. “Go ahead.”

He finished filling his cup from the pot, then started walking back across the floor. He did a quick head count. Only one truck was running short out of Central tonight. Not bad. Better than a lot of other nights, truth be told. It used to be much worse, the short-staffing. Back in the eighties, after the budget got so badly squeezed, more than half the trucks were going out with only three men on them, the equivalent of fielding a football team without an offensive line. Guys were doing solo rescues, stumbling into black passages alone, no one to back them up, bail them out if things went bad. There was one night a lady jumped from a flaming fifth-floor window because the ladder truck didn't have enough men to raise the fifty-five footer in time. They had to recruit a civilian—a freaking civilian—to hoist it up. They missed Constance Walker by fifteen seconds. When she jumped, she bounced off the ladder man climbing up to get her. She died when she hit the pavement.

Mike had good men working tonight, too. A cohesive group, almost all veterans. Mike went back years with most of those guys, decades, some of them. Johnny Casello, as competent a ladder man as the city had ever seen, had been in his drill class in 1972. The officers—Halvorsen, Coakley, Johnson—were three of the best in the department. Smart, seasoned, aggressive. He was especially close to Coakley, a relative by marriage, Joanne's cousin. “No family trees in Worcester,” Mike used to muse. “Just one big, tangled wreath.” Plus, he'd taught with Coakley in the eighties, when they were both assigned to the drill school. Paul Brotherton had been in their first class. So had Yogi. Three more men working out of Central that night—Bert Davis on the ladder, Bobby McCann on the engine, Tommy Dwyer on the rescue—had been Mike's students. Good firemen, Mike told himself, every one of them.

Teaching had been his idea, a request he'd made after ten years on the street. He'd had a good run, moved up fast. After two years on Ladder 7 out of Winslow Street, a crumbling, rat-infested shack of a station, he got onto Rescue 1. Five years later, he was promoted to lieutenant and sent to run his own truck, Engine 4 in the Park Avenue station, just north of downtown. A good district, fiery enough to keep a man busy, give him a regular fix. But he was still an egghead, worked a lot of the job in his head. He digested dense monographs and trade journals, kept current with advances in equipment and techniques, all of which made him a bit of an oddity. Firemen were creatures of habit, products of their own experience; they weren't much for newfangled gimmicks and book-read theories. Firefighting was a job learned by doing, by charging into the flames with a hose and an ax and a gut full of courage. And once a man conquered a fire, once he'd stood in the center of a furnace and walked back out, once mortal combat became a matter of routine, he was reluctant to change his methods.

Generations of firefighters, for instance, had worn the same basic battle gear—rubber waders that rose to the middle of the thigh and a long, heavy coat that fell just below the top of the boots. Standing straight and still, a man was fully protected; wrench too hard to one side or reach up too high and the coat shifted, exposed the lip of the boot, which would pucker into a funnel and catch water or, worse, a hot ember. By the late 1970s, however, lightweight, heat-resistant fibers had made full trousers practical. But hardly anyone wore them. A curious logic was invented to justify it, too: fireproof pants—quick hitches, in the jargon, or bunker pants—prevented men from feeling heat on their thighs, which gave them a false sense of security and thus made their job
more
dangerous, not less. Mike had heard that argument. Then he heard Bobby Woods got caught in a backdraft that blew his coat up around his waist. He visited Bobby in the hospital, saw the black scars charred into his groin and belly. Mike bought a pair of quick hitches after that, the first man in Worcester to routinely wear them.

Controlling his own equipment was no problem. But Mike saw other things, nagging inefficiencies that required a more systemic redress. Like the way hoses were fed. Worcester had strong water mains—tap a hydrant and the liquid spewed out like an uncorked geyser, a torrent more than adequate to feed two of the department's biggest hoses simultaneously. So Worcester firemen routinely attached their attack lines—the hoses that sprayed water on the flames—directly to the hydrants. In the days of horse-drawn hose wagons and, later, primitive pumper trucks, the vigorous supply was a blessing, allowing the men to put a maximum of wet stuff on the red stuff. It became a habit: the first engine on the scene would screw a Y-shaped valve onto the hydrant and run a pair of lines off it, the second engine would go find another hydrant, and so on, until hundreds of yards of hose had been dragged across rough asphalt and sharp curbs, stout cables crisscrossing the street like so many unraveled threads.

There was no need for such a tangle. Each of the department's engines were outfitted with pumps that could feed five, and sometimes six, hoses at once, all from a single connection to one hydrant. And the pumps could regulate the water pressure more efficiently; connecting a line directly to the main required wrenching back the hydrant to slow the flow, an imprecise and laborious method. Mike explained that to the brass, suggested that their engines were being used as overpriced hose wagons.

“What's the matter with the way we been doin’it?” the older guys would snap. “You saying we're doin’it wrong?”

“No, no, no,” Mike would answer. “I'm just saying that there's a better way to—”

“A better way? So we're doin’it wrong. That's what you're saying, right? We've been doing it wrong?”

That was when Mike decided to teach, work with the young guys before they could fall into the old routines, shake things up. He stayed with it for five years, long enough to get more than 120 recruits onto the trucks. About a quarter of them were assigned to Group II, five to his home station. He was responsible for what they learned years ago. Now he was responsible for getting them home at the end of the shift.

T
he alarm squawked from the speaker bolted to the wall at about quarter past five. Every man froze. Their muscles tensed. Their adrenal glands quivered. No one made a sound, waiting for the next noise out of the speaker. Most times, only words followed. “Engine 1,” dispatch might have said, or “Engine 8” or “Ladder 5”—but only one truck—before reciting an address and a task. One tone signaled a medical run or some other minor emergency, like going out to stabilize a coronary case until an ambulance arrived, or breaking a toddler out of a locked-up Taurus, or squirting water on a flaming car. Milk runs.

Sometimes, maybe every fifth time, a second tone followed the first. Two tones meant something more serious, perhaps a fire alarm ringing somewhere, but probably triggered by nothing more than a stray wisp of cigarette smoke or a burp of electrical current jiggling a circuit. Dispatch sent two engines and one ladder truck for those, picking whichever units were available and close.

Much rarer were three tones. Three tones meant a reported structure fire, a house or a condo or a strip mall already blowing smoke into the sky. Firemen longed for a triple. Three tones meant there would be blazing orange heat and churning black clouds and pockets of poison gas, wailing sirens and blinding lights and scalding steam and great, splashing floods. Three tones meant bashing in steel doors and smashing out glass windows and chopping jagged holes through steep, pitched roofs. Men with long metal spears and iron hooks would rip into ceilings and walls, chasing veins of fire hiding behind the plaster and above the joists. Yards of hose would uncoil through puddles of sooty water, and ladders would stretch up a hundred teetering feet. The sensations, the sights and sounds and smells, would be horrifying and exhilarating all at once. “Enough fire for everyone,” is what the veterans would say if the fire really started raging, and they would say it giddily, greedily, like little boys who'd stumbled into an unlocked candy shop.

Three tones didn't always turn out that way, of course, and not every man wished that they would. (One of the theorems of the station house was the Rule of Three, which held that every fire required three times more men to show up than were needed to put it out because one third wouldn't want to be there and another third wouldn't know what they were doing.) But a working fire promised at least the chance of action, and that is what a certain breed of firefighter craved. Paul, Jerry, Yogi, Robert A., Captain Coakley, nearly every man on Central Street was of that breed. They would feel more alive when confronted by the possibility of death, surrounded by it, threatened by it. They would not be afraid but only aware, in the same way that an alpinist, cramponed to a rock high above a thin and frigid void, was aware of gravity. The challenge was neither reckless nor foolhardy—indeed, because the danger was so obvious and omnipresent firefighters were exceedingly conscious of any signals that preceded a life-threatening shift in conditions—but it was enthralling. Every nerve tingled, a tremble that started in the primitive stem of the brain and skittered, like electricity through bare copper wire, into the arms, the legs, the chest, the gut.

So the men tensed at the first honk from the wall. Then they relaxed at the bored voice, all that excitable juice soaking back into their tissues. “Engine 3,” the dispatcher began.

Not one of their trucks. Engine 3 ran out of the Grove Street station. No one in Central had to move at all. That's when they stopped listening completely.

6

J
AY
L
YONS JOGGED ACROSS THE CEMENT FLOOR OF THE
G
ROVE
Street station as the dispatcher repeated the order for Engine 3 to roll, moving quickly but not with any enthusiasm. He hauled himself behind the wheel, switched on the motor, goosed the gas pedal, forced a growl out of the big diesel. Three more men, bulky in their bunker pants and turnout coats, piled into the compartment behind the cab. Jay's boss, Lt. John Sullivan, climbed into the passenger seat. The overhead door facing Grove Street rolled up and back, opening a portal into the December dusk. “Let's go,” Sullivan said. Jay dropped the transmission into gear and stepped harder on the gas. Sully yanked the cord for the air horn, toggled the siren, sent the engine onto the street with a yowl and a wail.

The first run of the night, a medical assist. Jay had long ago gotten tired of one-bell runs. Most engine men eventually did. There were just so damned many of them, sixteen thousand a year, give or take, more than half of any engine company's workload. It was a good theory, sending a truck out to every medical emergency dialed into 911. Every Worcester fireman was trained in advanced first aid, and with fifteen engines operating out of a dozen stations in every corner of the city, they usually beat the ambulances to the scene. There were some good calls, too, ones that made the guys feel like they were doing something important, actually helping someone. Every couple of months, an engine crew would help a woman through her last moments of labor, bring a new life into the world, or restart a heart with the defibrillator, keep an old life hanging on a little longer.