Burning Down the House

by Russell Wangersky

  We wrestled with his boot for a while. Every time we pulled, he screamed, then we stopped and he stopped and begged us all over again to save his boot. When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics didn’t fool around at all, took their scissors and cut the boot, fast, down both sides. His leg seemed to burst out through the slits even as they were cutting the leather, the flesh swelling right in front of our eyes. He closed his eyes after that.

  I’d blink my eyes and all at once I was back in the newsroom. The rest of the world, the newsroom and my reporters, had all been right there when all of this was happening in my head, but the noise they made was like a television turned on low in another room, the sound and motion at an easy and acceptable distance.

  It’s not the kind of circumstance you want to be explaining to your publisher, especially if you’re an editor responsible for assigning a roomful of news reporters. You don’t want to say, “Excuse me, I have a problem—I sometimes see car crashes that aren’t actually there, and it’s interfering with my work.” Especially if there is no clear way to make the crashes go away.

  I thought it better that nobody know I was heading out to my truck at the end of the day, putting my face on the steering wheel and crying uncontrollably, a combination of the stress of the newsroom and everything else. Behaviour like that has a way of convincing people that you can’t handle your job. You can’t explain it at the fire department either, because the other firefighters might be just as concerned about your ability to do that job. I can’t imagine how awful it would be to be suiting up in breathing apparatus, preparing to go into a building, and have my partner suddenly say to the captain that he wasn’t willing to go inside with me.

  Maybe someone at the fire department would have understood— but that wasn’t a chance I was willing to take. Instead, I worked hard on my poker face, tried to have that steady, easy, emotionless stare that Al MacDonald seemed to have perfected years before in Wolfville.

  Twice—right then, right in the middle of what felt like the leading edge of a total meltdown—I was picked as officer of the year by my firefighters. Showing up at most of the calls and all of the training, taking charge and making sure everything got done right. Able to fool everyone enough to get their respect.

  So twice, in 2001 and 2002, I was the recipient of a pewter-coloured statue of an old-time leather-helmeted firefighter with his hose, a firefighter leaning purposefully into the burning rubble. They were handed to me halfway through the annual fire department ball, right after the turkey, potatoes, gravy and mashed turnip, and just before the dancing was supposed to start. Each time, holding the statue, I felt more like the rubble than the firefighter, caught up in fragments of fires and crashes.

  “Thank you,” I remember saying both times, shaking the fire chief’s big warm hand. “Thank you.”

  Then back to the long tables and dessert, sitting in the dark and hoping again that the pagers would go off and a fire would swallow me up, would put me in that place of doing, that place way past thinking.

  I was having a beer with the chief, drinking a new kind of beer in a tall bottle, the first Nova Scotian beer to switch over from the stubbies.

  We’d been working on the ladder truck all day, getting ready to put it back into service. I’d been inside the turntable, cleaning out sandblasting sand, because I was the only firefighter who could fit, and my hair was full of grit and grease.

  The chief picked up my beer from the table, looked at it, and said that the first time he had seen the tall bottles was in a red pickup truck that had gone off the North Mountain Road in a drunk driving accident. The truck had been sitting in the top of a row of spruce trees, and there was a two-four of beer in the front seat and the bottles had broken all over the cab.

  I’d missed that call-out.

  “Took us hours to get that idiot down,” the chief said.

  SEVENTEEN

  I saw a photograph of a bus that had run over a cyclist, and read how it had taken twenty minutes to lift the bus and pry the cyclist out. They’d used equipment we called Vetter bags, big reinforced rubber rectangles that you fill up with high-pressure air like armoured balloons. It’s a tricky process, because you have to fill them and place them just right to keep everything in balance; a slip in training doesn’t mean much, but it’s not hard for a tour bus to squash a cyclist flat. I remember looking at where the airbags were in the photo but not at the victim, checking out how they were placed in case I ever had to do the same thing with a vehicle that heavy. Perhaps it’s the way hockey players watch a game, seeing something different than other people do—their eyes set to catch different clues, to spot different things.

  Firefighters—especially fire officers in charge of scenes—have to do that too. You’re supposed to think, not about people and how the already-passed instant of impact will fragment their lives, but about things such as the angles of incidence and reflection, the complex equations of force drawn on the pavement in tire rubber, and the directions of expended energy in the sprayed diamonds of broken safety glass, all in an effort to make sense of what may have happened physically to the people inside the cars. You examine where they were seated and where their seat belts webbed across their bodies, where they might be injured inside, far from your eyes or your touch. It’s as if, by some precise attention to physics or mathematics, you can work backwards and determine everything that happened in an instant, explosive equation.

  I was supposed to collect every scrap of information I could, indexing it in my head, while pointedly ignoring the fact that a back-injured teacher was wearing a sweatshirt identical to the one my wife often wore, or that the infant car seat thrown clear at an automobile crash site was the same model my younger son used to sit in. They call it the “mechanics of injury,” the way they call putting two pieces of broken bone together “reducing the fracture.” And perhaps terms like that exist to put some distance between you and the injured.

  Sometimes the mechanics of injury are crucial.

  Once, after a black Volkswagen Rabbit with a jack-o-lantern sticker in the back window pitchpoled four times—rolling end over end, not just side to side—down the darkened straightaway of an empty road, I watched the paramedics come back after dropping off their cargo just to take notes for the hospital on how many times the passengers had been flung into the windshield. They had been eggs thrown around inside a crate, a driver and passenger with no seat belts who were finally tossed from the car when the driver’s door was torn off. It was startling to see how much destruction the shiny wet pavement wore: easily fifty yards of car parts, fenders, mirrors, broken glass and plastic trim, along with every scrap of detritus that piles up in a person’s car—cassette tapes, an ice scraper, the jack and its detached handle, broken beer bottles, and, jarringly, a green and black plastic radio-controlled car, the latter a child’s toy, torn apart by its own pantomime of the accident that surrounded it. The toy car looked as if you should be prying open its plastic doors with small rescue tools in order to search for more—miniature— passengers.

  The passenger in the Rabbit had been lying just off the centre line of the road, thrown clear and unable to move, both of his legs aimed south but now pointing east, broken below the knee. And he howled, feral and loud in the shiny wet darkness, as cars struck him with their headlights and then their drivers pulled out around to pass by him—driving by slowly, but driving by just the same.

  The equation for the driver was exceedingly complex, with pieces that were almost impossible to outline concretely. Somewhere in the four long flips—each of which had left a clearly defined mark on the road or the shoulder (in one place the circular outline of a front wheel, so perfectly formed in the sand and gravel of the shoulder that you could put a finger into the dip left by every single lug)—he had left the car, sailed through the air and struck a concrete culvert with the back of his head, ripping a jagged tear that poured blood into the ditchwater. Faced with the human jigsaw, the doctors wanted to know how all the pieces
might have shifted apart. But all of it was barely inspired guesswork; knowing only where he had ended up and where the driver’s door lay in the road, you could draw several different trajectories for how and when he had been thrown clear, and never really know how long he had stayed inside the relative safety of the car.

  Down in the ditch, I had held his legs, listening to the rattling, uneven wetness of his breathing, but I could look across in the dark and see the shining hollow eyes of another firefighter who was holding the driver’s battered head. The ditch was deep enough that it offered its own solemn privacy. A breath, a breath, silence. Then a laboured start to that same equation all over again.

  The other firefighter had been the first on the scene—I was the second. He was Mike Reid, and the driver was in the ditch at the end of Mike’s driveway. Mike had come out of the house, heard a noise in the dark below him, and had scrambled down in time to lift the man’s face up out of the ditchwater before he drowned. I got there a few minutes later, to hold the man’s hips and keep his neck aligned as much as possible. No backboard between us, just the unnerving feeling that we were waiting for the man to die, because there wasn’t a heck of a lot else we could do. He had the uneven breathing of the head-injured, and we stayed with him as the other firefighters arrived and someone finally started to deal with the broken-legged passenger abandoned on the pavement above us.

  In the ditch, the paramedic had taken one look at the man with the big bull’s-eye flashlight and said, “We’ll have to move quick with this one.” He grabbed the belt of his trousers to shift him across onto the backboard. The motion pulled the man’s pants open, his penis lying still and curled in its thatch of pubic hair, and that was, oddly enough, the most unnerving sight of all, worse even than knowing that he was on the verge of death.

  His girlfriend came to the crash site after we had put him in the ambulance, and she stood at the police tape before calling out to me, “Is that Kevin who’s hurt? Is he dead?”

  You try not to give anything away at the scene itself—you never know who you’re talking to or what condition their family member is in. I said we didn’t know who was hurt yet, the sort of half answer that always ends up being caught out as a lie.

  “Well, that’s my car. That was my car. I know the sticker. Where’s Kevin?”

  And she came under the tape towards us, fast, and I yelled, and another firefighter knocked her down, a big firefighter who then wrapped her in his arms and just held her while she went from furious to panicked to tears—even though her boyfriend had taken her car without permission, without a licence and without insurance.

  I’ve done it too, grabbing and catching the wife of one of my firefighters, stopping her at an accident where four teenagers had piled a sedan into an embankment, and two of the teens had come over from the back seat and hit the windshield with their heads. She had been sure that her son was in the car, a car now dug nose deep into the simple roses and the night-smelling lupins, the car crumpled and still and cooling beneath an early spring moon. It was the late 1990s then, and I was struck by what an old-fashioned accident it was—that it had the kind of calamitous injuries we used to see all the more regularly before the use of seat belts became the law. They were injuries that happen when a car stops and its passengers don’t, sailing over the seats like missiles and hitting the windshield hard enough to star the glass, hard enough that you wonder how it is they don’t break their foolish necks in the process. Two stars of cracked glass from the passengers in the back seat—but the driver and front-seat passenger were virtually unhurt. None of them, as it turned out, was the son of the woman I had to tackle.

  But she hit me and pushed and swore anyway, and she probably remembers none of it now, even though I can’t forget the language she used—where I could go and what I could do with myself. Teeth white and shining in the half-light—I had more than a passing fear that she was going to bite me if I didn’t let her go—her eyes big and unnaturally bright, the panic making her unrecognizable.

  You can laugh back at the station, but the sting of it, the sheer suddenness of the event, doesn’t always go away.

  It was a big night, the kind of night when the moon comes up over the horizon and sets the tone for the whole arch of the sky. Down on the bay there was a tanker heading towards Holyrood, its lights bright and staring but somehow small as well, cast out in the big silver and black bowl of sea.

  I think I was close to that kind of angry panic, but no one was trying to stop me. Everyone was just letting me run.

  That accident with the four teenagers was one that stuck with me for years. It was only a few miles from my house, only the stretch of a finger across the town map that I carried between the front seats of the truck. Sitting on the wood floor in my living room, looking up towards the top of the hill, I would always know that it had happened there, just over the crest.

  One minute Eddie Sharpe was up on top of the big pile of burning brush with a pike pole, turning over the branches and slash so we can get the water in there; the next he’s just plain disappeared, and a huge column of sparks is shooting up all around where he had been standing so that it resembles a magic trick, as if Eddie is supposed to reappear somewhere else on the stage, miraculously spreading his arms and saying “Ta-dah.” Instead, we hear him yelling from right down inside the pile—it’s something like eight full tandem dump truck loads of slash burning like crazy in a gravel pit—because the pile’s burned through from underneath and he’s tumbled straight in, up to his knees in searing hot cherry red embers.

  It was almost funny once he got out, so we teased him for the rest of the evening, five or six of us fighting that huge fire for the better part of a Saturday night until we were so tired we could barely stand.

  EIGHTEEN

  Black night. Quiet. Another accident, the pager going off close to one o’clock in the morning.

  “MVA with injuries,” the dispatcher said. “Dogberry Hill Road, above St. Thomas Line.” Even as I picked up the phone to confirm we were rolling, I knew that the call was close to my house, that the chances were I would be the first one there, unless Gord Squires was still awake nine or ten houses above me and already on his way out to his car.

  “Portugal Cove–St. Philip’s responding,” I told the dispatcher.

  By the time I got in my pickup, there were already trucks on the road from the other side of the community, the small pumper out the station doors first so there would be medical gear soon. As I was driving past the store, I heard the radio key up and heard the rescue truck leaving the station, this time on my side of town, and I recognized Bob Lamar’s voice on the radio.

  I was well ahead of all of them by then, but at least there were other people on the way.

  The night was bright with moonlight, the road clear and empty. I turned up Dogberry Hill Road—and all of a sudden I was on top of the accident.

  I remember thinking that all the houses along the road had turned their backs: no lights were on. The houses looked lumped and black and silent, and there in the ditch was one nose-down car with no real damage visible. But there were injured people caught in my headlights like moths, bleeding, elbows bent, hands held high.

  Just like that, there was someone pounding on my closed window, while I was still figuring out where the emergency brake was, caught in the heavy mist between sleep and wakefulness, just trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I couldn’t even figure out how to open my door—my hand was fumbling around the inside of the truck.

  “I’m the driver,” the man was yelling, his palms flat on my closed window. “I’m the driver.”

  Even if I couldn’t figure out how to open the door, rolling the window down seemed simple enough, as if I were at a drive-in.

  “I’m the driver,” he said again.

  Lost, I reached out through the open window and opened my truck door from the outside.

  “There are more firefighters on the way,” I said, and I could already hear the siren of the re
scue rolling down the valley, brassy and hard against the cold of the night. I was putting my fire jacket on as I walked up to the wrecked car, and I could see there was someone standing next to it, in the ditch. One hand outstretched, the other pulled up at her left side, elbow bent—a teenager standing like Botticelli’s Venus, I remember thinking, even though her face was covered in blood and there was a long horizontal split in her forehead, just at her scalp, a sharp tear where her skin had broken when she hit the windshield face-first. She was wearing a sweater, a soft-looking blue sweater, except the only place it was still blue was in a V under her chin. Her face was completely scarlet except for the cornflower of her eyes.

  “Am I cut bad?” she said, and I got ready to lie.

  Standing in the ditch and looking hard at her scalp, I could see there were a lot of small bleeders; blood was welling steadily out of the gap in her hairline and flowing down her face. But there didn’t seem to be any major arteries cut—nothing pumping or spraying, nothing losing enough blood that she should pass out as a result. Still, she was wavering back and forth, moving just slightly, as if she were a long stalk of grass being shifted by a small and fickle breeze.

  “Not too bad,” I said. “Just hang on a minute or two. Just stand still. There’ll be someone else here.”

  I didn’t want her to move, not even to sit down on the shoulder of the road. Going into the windshield often means neck injuries, and I couldn’t stop to stand behind her and immobilize that neck, that thin, soft, blood-streaked neck, not while I was the only one there, not when there were more victims who could be more seriously hurt.

  The rescue truck was coming straight down the valley by the Old Broad Cove River now, and I could hear the hills playing tricks with the siren. Sometimes the echo of the siren was louder than the siren itself, the sound overlapping and weaving through itself and making the familiar sound foreign and complex.

  The rescue truck would mean equipment and extra hands and at least one more firefighter, and there would be others from the valley quickly enough. Gord Squires, Joe Hanames—they’d be in their cars by now, maybe one of them at the wheel of the big pumper, because it was late enough that all the firefighters would have been home in bed. Gord and Joe. Both steady hands—steadier by far than me. I wished they would hurry.