by Sean Flynn
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.
The 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
JAY LYONS JOGGED ACROSS THE CEMENT FLOOR OF THE GROVE 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.
But most first-responder runs didn't amount to much more than baby-sitting until the ambulance showed up. Like this one, chugging to a gym on Millbrook Street where a diabetic had passed out while lifting weights. The men from Engine 3 would keep him warm, monitor his vital signs, wait for the paramedics to take over. A useful task. There were worse calls to get. People dialed 911 for ridiculous reasons: an upscale private club used the firemen and the ambulance drivers to bounce its drunks, insisting their stumbling belligerence was merely a gentleman's seizure. Sunburns and menstrual cramps became emergencies after midnight. One of the engine companies was on a first-name basis with a petite homosexual hustler who called every few months complaining about his bleeding rectum.
It wasn't the kind of action Jay had signed up for. Jay lusted for fire, monstrous, voracious flames, untamable incinerators, the infernos that hardly ever reared up in Worcester anymore. He'd been through a couple, even taped a picture inside his locker to remind himself it could happen again. It was black-and-white, reprinted from a newspaper, a three-family tenement disintegrating in flames two years earlier. Jay wrote in the margin, “My first big blaze!” He tolerated the first-responders the way an athlete tolerates wind sprints: required drudgery for a chance to play in the big game.
At least it was his night to drive. Jay mashed the pedal to the floor, flattening it with his boot, accelerating north on Grove. Cars on the road slowed, moved to the curb, parting before the shriek and roar of the engine. Jay backed off the gas at the corner of Glennie Street, pulled the wheel around to the right, hand over hand, leaning into the turn. The best part of a bad run, sitting high and forward, a captain on a flat sea of blacktop. “When I'm driving Engine 3,” he'd tell his father every so often, “I'm living every little boy's fantasy.” Which he knew was true because it had been his fantasy.
Jay had been hanging around firehouses since he was old enough to pedal his bike to the Park Avenue station, a few blocks from the house where he grew up. When he was a little older, he'd be at headquarters twice a month with Explorer Post 201 listening to one of the veterans talk about the finer and more gruesome aspects of the job—how to lay a hose or smother a chemical fire or cut an unconscious passenger out of a mangled Buick. He clipped stories of spectacular fires from the newspaper, pasted them into scrapbooks, read them, studied them, imagined himself in an oversize coat and a heavy helmet, rushing into the flames and carrying out a body, limp and barely alive. At night, he'd lie in bed listening to the chatter on a Bearcat 210XL eighteen-channel scanner, waiting for the three telltale tones. Then he'd jostle his father awake. “C'mon, dad,” he'd jabber. “We're going to a fire.” If the flames were close enough, if the hour was early enough, Jim Lyons always took his boy. If the fire was stubborn, if it took the men longer to wash it away than Jim felt like waiting, he would sometimes leave his son. He knew Mike McNamee would get him home.
Mike lived across the street in a yellow Cape on Saxon Road, a winding semicircle in a leafy neighborhood west of downtown. Jay was twelve when Mike and Joanne moved in with their two daughters. A real smoke-eater, living right outside his bedroom window. And on Rescue 1! Those guys went to all the fires, got to do the coolest work. Mike would tell Jay about the big fires, the worst fires, the scariest fires, feed his imagination. Some nights, if Jay didn't have school the next morning, Mike would find him a spare bunk at Central Street, let him spend the night like a real fireman.
It seemed to be hardwired into him, Jay's fascination with fighting fires. No one in his family, four generations of Worcester stock, had ever worked for the department, except for the time his great-grandfather took a spot on a bucket brigade. But Jay was enthralled with the tradition, the gallantry. It was a romantic image, one seared into his mind by the heat of a fire one cold winter morning. Three sharp brays from the Bearcat woke him up. The fire was close, only five houses away. Jay scrambled out of bed, pulled on some clothes, and sprinted down the sidewalk. The flames had begun with a loose electrical wire, a spark that burrowed into the wall, fed on insulation and studs, then broke through, grabbing curtains and furniture and wood moldings. When Jay got there, the whole house was burning bright, wrapped in fire and bellowing smoke. The first engines were at the curb, men dragging the line to a hydrant, wrenching the coupling into place.
One of Jay's neighbors stood barefoot in the street, screaming. “There's someone inside! The old guy's still inside!”
Three firefighters forced open the front door, crawled to the kitchen, all the way in the back. They felt a body on the floor near the door, an elderly man choked unconscious. The firemen hauled him out the back and started working on him, pumping his chest and breathing hard into his mouth. It was too late. The old man died at City Hospital less than an hour later.
But they'd tried to save him. That's what Jay remembered, the important part. Years later, in the winter of 1983, Jay wrote an essay for his application to Clark University. In cramped and slanted cursive, he wrote about Explorer Post 201, and then told the whole story of the fire—“a significant experience or achievement that has special meaning for you,” according to the instructions on the essay sheet—from the moment he woke up until the old man died at the hospital.
“‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’is a quote that many people would use to describe firefighters,” he wrote at the end of his essay.
Seeing these men rush into this house made me wonder why they do this. Why did these men risk their lives for someone they didn't even know? The answer is not found in the quote, because these men are not fools, and the answer is not because they are being paid for it. The answer itself is very simple, this is their life, the life of saving others.
Sixteen years later, on a night just as cold as that winter morning, he was behind the wheel of a Worcester Fire Department engine. He wasn't saving anyone. He was going to hold the hand of a passed-out diabetic, play nursemaid for some guy who forgot to snarf down a candy bar. That was his life, another goddamned medical assist.
Engine 3 rolled through the gloaming, the road ahead strobing red and white, puddles of light swirling across the blacktop and the sidewalks and the storefronts. Jay liked the view from
the cab better after dark, the flashes and reflections, the streaky contrast of sharp colors against the muted gray of night. He stopped complaining about the task at hand, even if it had been only to himself. He was lucky to be back on a fire truck, living his little-boy dream. A second chance at a fantasy—how many guys got that?
He couldn't remember exactly how he'd screwed everything up. He could piece the main narrative together from what he'd read in the newspapers and what the prosecutor argued at his trial and what the other cops said before they kicked him off the force. But the details were lost, washed away in a flood of foamy beer.
It had happened four years ago, on a night like this, when the sky was cold and gray and autumn was losing ground to winter. He was sitting behind the wheel of his car, drunk, staring at the black pool of the Atlantic splashing out to the horizon, spilling into the abyss beyond the curve of the earth. He fiddled with a .38 revolver in his lap. His personal sidearm, not the one the Massachusetts State Police had given him along with a badge three years before.
He'd left the Worcester Fire Department in 1992. After more than four years of riding Engine 1, Jay was restless, tired of waiting for alarms that hardly ever rang. The frantic chatter he'd heard on his Bearcat—two, three, four fires a night—had been replaced by single tones and long hours of silence. He looked into his own future, saw three decades drag out, him sitting in a worn-out chair around a chipped table, his belly starting to fold over his belt, muscles melting, crazy with boredom, waiting for something to burn. So when the state police offered him a job, he took it. Maybe policing would have more action. Maybe he'd catch a killer or a rapist or a bank robber. If nothing else, he'd be in a cruiser, moving, accelerating. His mother warned him not to go. “Stay with the fire department,” she'd told him. “It's what you've always wanted to do.” He should've listened to her.