The Smoke Room (3 page)

I heard the apparatus bay doors open. I heard the apparatus fire up. And I faltered again . . . still moving, still straining against the woman on the weight bench, as if it were possible to finish what Iola Pederson and I were doing and still make the rig before it pulled out of the station. As if the bell had caught me drinking a glass of water instead of copulating. I’d been abducted by the most primal of biological imperatives.

“I gotta go,” I said finally, trying to extricate myself from her while she kept her legs wrapped around my waist. Her eyes still had that doggy look. She must have thought this was some sort of game, because she wasn’t going to let me go. We wrestled until we uncoupled with a horrible sucking sound. As I sprinted for the stairs, she lay flat on her back on the weight bench, clothing in disarray, hair mussed, face flushed, bare breasts melting against her ribs, white thighs squashed on either side of the bench.

Upstairs, I stomped down the narrow corridor to the apparatus bay and emerged into the garage just as the engine roared out of the building, leaving me in a cloud of diesel exhaust, Tronstad staring back at me from the darkness of the crew cab.

They were gone and I was not.

I felt like vomiting.

I’d screwed up a couple of times in my short career, but I’d never come close to anything like this. I didn’t know the official punishment for a missed alarm, but numerous unpleasant possibilities sprang to mind. I’d heard stories about people in my predicament, and in those stories the miscreants were invariably the butt of crude firefighter parody and ridicule. My name would be forever appended to that sorry list.

For the longest time I just stood there staring at the empty apparatus bay, and then, as the timed house lights went off, I got the dry heaves and rushed over to the slop sink. The radio in the watch office had been spewing information on the alarm, so I knew they were headed to a confirmed house fire. Fully involved. Flames showing. Trapped occupants.

Fully involved.

Engine 29 didn’t get a call like this but once every couple of years.

Dashing into the watch office, I ripped the computer printout from the machine and scanned the response information. The fire was on Arch Place SW, only blocks from the station.

It couldn’t get any worse. I was going to have charges written on me. I was going to get a month off without pay. Chief Abbott might even try to take my job.

On the apparatus floor I spotted my bunking boots and trouser combination where I’d left them, and next to the boots, my coat and helmet—which I routinely left in the crew cab, but which Tronstad must have offloaded, along with my portable radio.

A fierce glimmer of hope struck me as I realized what Tronstad had in mind. I could don my gear and drive to the fire in my own car. It wouldn’t absolve my infraction, but it might diminish the punishment.

4. MAD DOG GUM BECOMES THE DEPARTMENT LAUGHINGSTOCK

AS I SCRAMBLE
into my gear, Iola Pederson materializes from the basement, and although I don’t notice her until she speaks, she is furious. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” One of her breasts is hanging out of her blouse, and I notice her panties bunched in her hand. The fact that I’ve noticed any of this bothers me. It bothers me a lot. Even now I’m thinking about sex.

I brush past her and flee the building through the personnel door next to the large roll-up apparatus door at the rear of the station, squeezing in my bulky turnout clothing into the Recaro seat, clumsily working the racing-style clutch and brake pedals of my Subaru WRX with my fat rubber boots.

As I swing out of the driveway behind the station, I catch a glimpse of Iola watching me like an abandoned puppy. I pray she has the good sense to vacate the station before we get back. Things will be incomparably worse if Lieutenant Sears finds out I missed the call because I was banging some woman in the basement.

With adrenaline and guilt saturating my bloodstream, none of this is easy. I am sweating and trembling and on the verge of messing my britches. I feel as if I’ve been punched in the stomach, as if my pounding heart is skipping every third beat.

My WRX is basically a rally car, and I drive it that way now, running stop signs and red lights, zipping around what little traffic there is on the roads at this time of night, sliding through corners and working the short-throw shifter I’ve installed. Throughout it all, I am unable to catch my breath. More astonishing than anything else is the fact that my fall from grace had taken less than ten minutes. I’m thinking,
This is the worst fuckup of my life.

Everybody’s bloodstream takes on adrenaline during alarms. You want to do well. You want to be safe. You don’t want to get hurt. You don’t want to see other people hurt, firefighters or civilians. Time is limited, and you are always in a hurry. People are watching. You have a split second to make decisions upon which lives depend. There exists the very real possibility of getting injured. Or killed. Tonight it is more than adrenaline, however.

Tonight I am crazy with fright. Fright that Tronstad will go into the fire without me and end up maimed. Fright that people will die because of my absence, that Sears will hound me out of the department. Fright that I will become the department laughingstock.

Sears is a no-nonsense, by-the-book officer who does not tolerate screwups, and this is the pièce de résistance of screwups. A week after he met me, Lieutenant Sears said something that still sticks in my craw. “Gum, you mean well, but you make mistakes. Most of them are small ones, but every once in a while you pull a doozy.” He arched an eyebrow at the word
doozy.
“Watch yourself.” At the time I’d considered his words a huge insult, but I’ve since proved him right.

I switch on the portable radio and stuff it into the chest pocket on my bunking coat, each transmission making me more frenzied than the last.

The dispatcher says, “Engine Twenty-nine. This is a report of a house fire. Several callers have stated the occupants may still be inside.”

Lieutenant Sears announces over the radio that he is at the location on Arch Place SW. “Flames showing from the first floor of a two-story wood-frame building approximately forty by fifty. No exposures. We’re laying a preconnect and establishing Arch Command. Engine Thirty-six, lay a supply and a backup line. Engine Thirty-two, you’ll be the RIT team. Ladder Eleven, split your crew. Do a search and rescue, and ventilate.”

Sears is good on the radio. He hasn’t been at 29’s long enough for us to judge how he will react on the fire ground, but around the station he talks a good fire, and tonight his radio voice is accelerated but calm, just the way it should be.

Because of a preponderance of oversized trucks and SUVs parked on either side, the streets around Arch Place are even narrower than usual. When Engine 29 stops, it effectively plugs the thoroughfare so no other vehicles can get past.

The house is on the east side of the street, flames boiling out a picture window on the near side, heavy black smoke pouring from the front door. I swerve into a tight space between two colossal SUVs and pop out of my Subaru like a cork out of a bottle, rolling onto the pavement. I pick myself up and sprint up the shadowy street, toward Engine 29.

Highlighted by flames, a silhouette in a helmet and bunking coat walks through the yard in front of the house. From his military bearing I know it is Lieutenant Sears, who oddly enough has never been in the military. Johnson will be working the pump panel on the engine. Tronstad’s job will be to take the nozzle, lay out all two hundred feet of hose, and go inside.

I don’t see any sign of Tronstad, but I spot an inch-and-three-quarters line stretching from the rear of Engine 29 across the yard and inside the front door of the house. Normally, Tronstad and I would be together on the end of that hose line, pushing it into the house until we find the seat of the fire, partners to the end. That is our contract. In the fire department you have a partner and you remain in contact with him or her throughout a fire, a shared system of responsibility the Seattle department adopted subsequent to a series of firefighter deaths years ago.

Because of me, Tronstad is alone.

When I climb into my seat in the crew cab to get my air mask and backpack, Robert Johnson is on the catwalk in front of me working the pump panel. I slip on my MSA backpack, put my face piece on, activate the bottle, and hook up the air.

Inside the house, flames lick a window to the right of the front door.

The hose line snakes through the smoky front doorway, but there is no sign of Tronstad. No indication water is being applied to the fire. The smoke is black and hot. Through it I can see only part of the house and the front doorway. For all I know, he’s already tits up.

As I race across the yard, I bump into a large man in a bathrobe and slippers, hitting him so hard, we both tumble in the grass. We’ve been told not to run on the fire ground, and this is one of the reasons.

“You see another firefighter go inside?” I ask as I get up and head for the front door. “Is this your house?”

“I live across the street. The Ranklers live here.”

“You see a firefighter go inside?”

“A while back.”

“Was he alone?” God, what a stupid question. Of course he was alone. There is only one rig at the scene, and I’ve already spotted two of the three firefighters on it, Johnson at the pump panel and Lieutenant Sears in the yard. “Did they get out? The people who live here. Have you seen them?”

“I don’t know. The man’s in a wheelchair. They’re—”

“Two people?”

“Yes. A man and his wife.”

I heel around and race toward the front door, trying not to trip over the hose. To my surprise, I cross paths with Lieutenant Sears on the porch and almost knock him over. I am out of control.

“Where’s your line?” Sears yells. “Don’t come up here without a line. And where’s your partner?”

Without answering, I crawl through the front door, where the interior of the house is as dark as the inside of a nut. When you’re in a house that’s on fire, the rest of the world ceases to exist. You have no friends, no family, no past, and no goals except to do your job and get out. You maintain concentration because if you don’t, the fire will spank you. I’ve never been in a good house fire and been able to think about anything but the here and now, never wanted to think about anything else. Afterward, probably because you’ve been closer to death than at any other time, you realize you’ve never been more alive, either.

The doorway is dark with rushing hot gasses and smoke that looks thick enough to ride a surfboard on. I squat low under the heat and follow the hose line to the left. I’m moving like a mad dog. A mere five feet inside, I bump into a man and knock him against the wall. I know it is Tronstad by the way he curses when my plastic helmet smashes against the hard air cylinder on his back. I’ve never been so hyped. Not at a fire. Not the time my mother and I went to San Francisco and got mugged. Not the time I fell off a cliff when I was eleven. If I wasn’t twenty-four years old, I would think I was having a heart attack.

“What the hell! If that’s you Engine Thirty-six fucks, you can just get out of my face.” Tronstad’s angry voice tugs me back to reality.

“It’s me.”

“Who the fuck is ‘me’?”

“Gum. How much have you searched?”

“I got turned around. I’m in here alone, man. I been alone fuckin’ forever.”

“The neighbor thinks there’s somebody in here. Where have you searched?”

My helmet light is on and I have the feeling Tronstad’s is on as well, but there’s so much smoke, I can’t see his light or the beam from mine. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a good house fire where there isn’t a truck company ventilating, but because they aren’t there to ventilate, I can’t see ten inches in front of my face.

We hear flames in the rooms to the right of the front door. The fire is beginning to lap over our heads with a soft crackling sound, and I can feel the heat increasing. We don’t have long. When you open the door on a house fire, you give it additional oxygen, which causes the fire to build, and if you don’t get water on it right away, it grows like a son of a bitch.

“How much have you searched?”

When he doesn’t reply, I crawl over him like a halfback swimming through a sea of linemen for a touchdown. I don’t have time to wait for his answer. I head into the living room.

I know what the layout of the house probably is from having been in so many of these remodeled prewar houses on aid calls. Somewhere between me and the kitchen will be a stairwell leading up.

Like a madman I search the rooms at a breakneck pace. I am stronger, faster, smarter, and crazier than a slaughterhouse rat, and more focused than I’ve ever been in my life. I crawl on my hands and knees, performing a frantic left-wall search of the rooms, knocking over lamps and chairs and anything that gets in my way, plunging through rooms like a burglar hyped on methamphetamines.

To the left of the doorway is a corridor, which is where I’ve met and trampled Tronstad. Next is a living room filled with furniture I identify only by touch: couches and coffee tables. After that I encounter a small dining room, then the kitchen. I storm through them all on my hands and knees. It is far too hot to stand up. Toward the rear of the house, off the kitchen, I encounter a closed door.

When I try to open it, the door jams against an object.

The house is clean and tidy, so I don’t expect any doors to be blocked. I stand up in the heat and ram my shoulder into the door, breaking it apart. As I lever the door open, I am barely able to squeeze in. Blocking the entrance is a wheelchair with a man in it, unconscious, slumped over, his head and neck forming a wild distortion of normal human body mechanics.

I pull the chair back, kick the door out of the way, and wheel him through the smoky house the way I came in. We bump into objects in the smoke, but after about a minute of crashing into furniture, I manage to trundle the heavy wheelchair and its cargo across the hose line in the hallway and outside onto the porch. His white hair is combed straight back and is neat enough for a portrait.

Behind me in the house I hear somebody opening the bale on a nozzle, and water strikes the ceiling hard. I recognize Tronstad’s style—Tronstad, who’d been a firefighter in the Air Force before joining the Seattle department. We are taught to dispense just enough water to put the flames out, never to drown a fire, especially when working inside. A cubic foot of water turns into 1700 cubic feet of steam, and the steam smothers the fire—thus you put the fire out without causing water damage. Dry floors after a fire signal you’ve done your job correctly.

There are more crews on the scene now, and one of the firefighters in the yard sees me and heads toward the wheelchair while I duck back through the smoke. The neighbor said there were two people inside. I have to find the other one.

Even though the house is as dark and smoky as it was on my first traverse, I make a beeline for the bedroom where I found the man, moving with more confidence now that I’ve been through these rooms once.

There is no one else in the bedroom.

I get lucky and locate stairs at the back of the house. The air in the house grows hotter as I climb the carpeted steps. The smoke is denser, if that is possible. I’ve been sweating since before I left the station, but now I feel the heat radiating off my equipment as my gear begins to grow hot. Against my neck, the collar of my bunking coat feels like toast just out of the oven.

At the top of the stairs, I swing my arms in a wide swath but find only carpet. I turn right. The first door I come to is closed. It turns out to be a closet. I find a window and break it with my portable radio. The glass panes splatter on the rooftop outside like falling crystal. I now hear Engine 29’s pump outside. I am sweating in my gear, growing weaker with each passing moment.

I turn and begin working my way down the hallway, past the stairs. On my right I find a doorway; inside, there’s a body on the floor, a woman, tiny and dressed in nightclothes. Shaking produces no results. She is out cold. I lean over to listen for breathing but hear nothing. It is hotter up here than it was downstairs, and my helmet and gear are so hot I find myself wriggling around inside the suit to avoid skin contact with it.