Big Steiger aims a look of hard inquiry at the apprentice and nods at the door. The kid, helpless in the face of such raw, animal ascendancy, steps forward and swings it closed.
Room 303 was the last one I broke into, during my last fire, my last night on the job. I’d clomped upstairs in the dark with Reed and Steiger, full gear, hose and lifeline, breathing loud and laboured inside the mask. From between the room’s floorboards and out of the joins between the wainscoting and walls, spotlit by my headlamp, smoke hissed up in gauzy sheets that broke apart at waist level, scrolling and spreading through the room. And there was purple smoke, like a stage effect at a heavy metal show. A rooming house is about the worst place for a fire, short of a chemical factory. Narrow hallways, the wiring below code, a dozen rooms or more, each warehoused with the kind of fodder that fires dote on—aged mattresses, bales of newspapers and Reader’s Digest, paperbacks, LPs, dry-rotted furniture. This place was sensationally decrepit. Shredded Insulbrick over century-old clapboard. Packed with flammables and going up in a whoosh. We had four trucks out front, ladders deployed, crews fighting to dent the firestorm that had already blown out the lower windows, seeking more oxygen, more space to expand. The crews were spraying from all angles, triangulating the fire’s heart, trying to buy us a few minutes upstairs. In the south alley, another hose was drenching the side-door stairwell where we’d entered and where we hoped to exit, soon. For now the lower flight of stairs was a foaming, terraced cascade, like a salmon weir.
There were five of us inside. Truba and Santos were on the second floor and they would be moving fast, I knew, making sure the rooms were vacated and if possible rescuing any pets. Reed, Steiger and I had climbed to the third floor on the same mission.
It’s remarkable how many people take the time to lock their doors when fleeing a major fire. As if the whole event might be a burglar’s ruse. And it happens more often, not less, in the poorer buildings. We didn’t give the place any odds of surviving, and if it did survive it would be demolished, so I wasted no time putting my axe to the door, a necessity I always enjoyed: the arc and acceleration of the heavy blade overhead, powered by you and at the same time pulling your arms along for the ride, the big, gratifying crunch as you connect at the targeted spot, usually to the inside of the handle.
The door of 303 burst open, one blow. Though these old doors were solid, not veneer—crafted with conscience in a conscientious time—the wood around the lock was rotten, the whole structure weakened by a few dozen tenancies of constant opening, closing, slamming. I heard another door splinter nearby. As I pushed into the room, Reed, up the hall, was calling through his portable that there was a cat in 306. Steiger called back, “Grab it and let’s move.” I peered into 303. Those hissing plies of floorboard smoke were hypnotic. It still wasn’t too smoky to see: a fridge and, surprisingly, a freezer too. Red sleeping bag on a mattress on the floor, square Arborite table with an ashtray and two beer cans, a plastic church-hall chair. A steel dolly, the kind used to move large appliances. The pasteboard wardrobe seemed to be full of fancy stuff: swaths of what looked like red velvet, black silk. And on the floor beside it, two extra-large black plastic bags, as if for industrial garbage. Bags of tires?
I’m not sure why I did it—Steiger was hollering again that we had to move—but I walked over and investigated. I parted the thick, unsecured lips of the first bag and jerked back in disgust: a dark, scaled coil as thick as my upper arm. No need to feel it. I knew it was alive, or had been until moments ago—nobody lives in a single room with enormous dead snakes, though sharing the place with living ones seems almost as crazy. I backed away, turned and came out the door just as Steiger reached it.
“Something in there? We got to move now.” There was a problem with the voice amp of his mask. His voice was faint, tinny—a worked-up announcer broadcasting warnings on a distant radio.
“No, sir,” I shouted. “Yes. Snakes. Two, I think. Big ones. Huge.”
His eyes widened behind the mask. Reed loomed out of the smoke, a Siamese cradled in his arms, oddly silent, its squinted blue eyes running. Reed said, “What is it, Terr?”
“Snakes. Big ones. Maybe we should bring them?”
“They moving?” Steiger asked.
“No.”
“Probably dead. Can’t be worrying about snakes.”
“Got to get this cat out,” Reed said, and he lumbered toward the stairs.
“And dangerous,” Steiger said. “Let’s go.”
“I don’t think they’re dead, sir.”
“Now!” Steiger said, and I followed him.
We pounded down the sodden, steaming last flight to the door. Heat radiated through the inner wall, fire on the other side. We clicked out our regulators. Truba and Santos stood squared in front of the door, blocking it like riot police. A small man, facing them, wanted to get past. He hopped once, comically, surprisingly high, trying to see over them. He was bald on top and the greying fringe of his hair was a fright wig of long, tangled curls. A gaunt, excited face—yet the left side of it was passive. He was yammering in French but his urgency didn’t budge the drooping half of his face, which looked years younger, lineless, uninvolved. Reed, with the weeping Siamese, pushed past this standoff and then Steiger did too. I shouldered in between Truba and Santos, adding my width to their wall. I grew up in Montreal and knew some French. Maybe I could help. The man wanted something from his room. This always happens, especially with the older, poorer victims. I said, “Puis-je vous aider, monsieur?” and he paused for a moment, startled, then thrust his contorted face at me and screamed, “Sauvez mes serpents!”
“Those are your snakes,” I said in English. He was shouting in French again and I made out a few details. He performed in clubs, at fairs, circuses. He and his serpents. They were how he earned his bread. He was in town for only a few months. He should never have come here.
“Ils sont dangereux, vos serpents?”
“Non, absolument pas!” he cried, and again he tried pushing past us.
Truba was getting the gist of the French. “Fuck his snakes,” he said. “Nobody’s going back in for a fucking snake.” And he leaned down over the man, his big gloved hand pointing upward as he enunciated, full volume, “Danger—okay?”
“I don’t care about it!” the man said with a dense accent. “Ils sont ma vie!”
Steiger was back. The heat was scorching through my gear now, into my shoulders and spine. Truba and Santos and I, and now Steiger, were a human bulkhead protecting this lunatic from the killing heat. Down one side of his double face—half-frenzied, half-resigned—tears streamed, lit silver by our headlamps, which were all focused on him. I felt for him. Steiger didn’t.
“Man wants his snakes,” Santos announced.
“Get him out of here,” Steiger roared. “Your snakes are all gone, okay? It’s over! Christ, this is a four-alarm fire!”
Steiger is a giant, like I said, a buzz-cut linebacker of a man with a big, groomed Asterix the Gaul moustache that hides his mouth even when he’s yelling commands. Once, in a competition, he bore two of the smaller men in a fireman’s carry, one over each shoulder. The most daunting man I’ve ever met. Even the platoon chief shies up around him. Though I’m not a big guy myself, I’ve never been the type to scare—but let Steiger, with those cold-forged eyes, level one of his alpha glowers at you and something folds up in your soul. It’s a myth that bullies lack self-esteem. Most bullies have plenty. I never took to Steiger, never liked his crude sarcasm about my choice of books and movies in the fire hall, and now I deeply disliked how he was giving the Look to this little man. I could see it: behind the man’s eyes the resolve was wilting and I hated to see it die, that rare, rallied courage, stronger than adrenaline, that gives anyone heroic strength for a short while. It might come never, or once in a lifetime, maybe more often for a woman, giving birth (I was there both times and saw it in Tricia, especially with our firstborn—a state beyond mere inspiration). Battling fires, I guess I’v
e gotten there more often than most, twice helping to rescue the children of strangers, and one time also when my younger girl was brushing a horse in its stall and it shifted and pinned her, I leapt in and—so I hear—grappled that thousand-pound mare away from her and against the back wall.
Those states of pure, fearless purpose helped keep me in the crew for a long time—kept me there even with Steiger as captain. Though if it hadn’t been him, it might have been someone else. There’s always someone around to set you straight. To let you in on God’s private view about where to draw the line between what counts down here and what doesn’t. As for the official line: we save people or we die in the attempt. Dogs or cats if we can do it without dying. Budgies and gerbils if it’s possible and convenient. Reptiles, I guess, not at all.
So Steiger kept bawling at the man, who kept pleading back in a flinching little voice, and the heat went on building inside my suit. I fixed my gaze on the snake man’s face so as not to let Steiger catch and command my eye. Then I turned and splashed back into the stairwell, clicking my regulator into place. The inner walls were slick, sweating grease and creosote. Behind me, a moment of near quiet—then Steiger was ordering me to get my ass back outside and the snake man was yapping instructions in a hopeful, higher voice. Steiger thumping in behind me. I was taking the steps two at a time, no hose, no lifeline. At the first turning I saw Steiger peripherally, at the bottom of the stairwell, glaring up, hollering in a voice ragged with anger and disbelief. Someone was disobeying him.
The smoke was heavier now. I glanced up the second-floor hallway: smoke from under the doors that Truba and Santos had closed when they fled. The last flurry of words the snake man had pitched at me settled into sense: Don’t worry. Ils ont mangé. They’ve eaten. They’re sleeping. Ils dorment dans leurs sacs.
By floor three I was winded again. No one would last long up here without a mask, but the snakes still had a prayer, down on the floor, in a dormant state, léthargiques, tu comprends?, inside those bags. I pushed open the hacked door of 303 and ducked low, under the worst of the heat and smoke, and then got down on all fours. Sometimes in the final stages you have to wriggle on your stomach, a frogman searching the murky floor of a lake. My headlamp showed about two metres. I found the first bag and rose into a crouch and peeked in—that unmoving, monstrous coil—then gathered the neck of the bag in a chokehold. I was counting on heavy and it was. I remembered the dolly across the room but knew I might not find it in this smoke. I turned my back to the bag, braced my hands over my shoulder, heaved. I had the bag sealed but I hated not being able to see it. Understand this much—I wasn’t acting out of sentimentality. I’ve never cared for snakes. I’m more the mammal type. Horses, cats, big goofy retrievers.
I rose with a grunt that I felt more than heard, then stumped to the door, keeping as low as possible. I wasn’t sure if there was movement inside the bag or if it was just the contents slopping against my back. A hundred and twenty pounds, at least. I almost crashed into Steiger, who filled the doorway.
“We have to get out now!” The voice from his mask was minuscule, shaky. I couldn’t make out the face under the headlamp. The little voice commanded, “Leave the goddamned snake! These floors could go any time!”
“I’m not leaving it, sir,” I said. It helped that his face was hidden. It helped that my voice, a bellow inside my mask, now dwarfed his. “And I’ll come back for the other if the floors hold.” I trudged toward him, to get past. What else could I do? It’s not like I was suddenly fearless. Not at all. There was the fire, there was Steiger, there was a huge tropical constrictor coiled a few inches from my throat. But where I draw the line now is nowhere. Alive is alive. Why let a thing die for being what it can never help but be?
Steiger moved aside. I made for the stairs, my eyes scalded with sweat. A low, immense, steady moaning welled up from beneath us, as if the building were giving up the ghost—the sound of a fire that has found maximum sustenance and will no longer be deterred. From behind me I heard, “You’re finished now, Decker, you know that?” I started downstairs, thinking he must be close behind. At the second-floor landing I glanced up the hallway, flame visible through the smoke. At the final turn in the stairwell there was a fast crashing of steps behind me as if the captain were staggering, or being shoved downward, and as I glanced back I saw why—he had the other bagged snake over his shoulder, gripping it with just one hand. “You’re finished,” he panted, and his voice seemed smaller than ever.
[ HEART & ARROW ]
In his thirties now, Merrick spends little time at bars, but as he tells his big sister, Laurel, near the end of her fortieth birthday bash, at ten he was a genuine regular.
“What do you mean a regular?” Her shrewd blue eyes squint at him through the beige-rimmed glasses he still isn’t used to seeing her wear. He looks down, rubbing the blond stubble of a beard that Sheila, his girlfriend back in Toronto, has urged him to grow so he’ll look older, more hireable.
“Downstairs,” he says. “At Mom and Dad’s.”
“Well, I don’t remember going there. And in high school, believe me, I did the full tour.”
“I mean the bar in our basement, Laurel. Our own bar.”
“Oh—you mean Mom and Dad’s.”
“That’s the place.”
She lowers her face—puffy, a bit lined, beautiful—and studies him over the top of her glasses, faint red eyebrows arched, the way their mother used to when she was sober, serious. “Merr. You’re not telling me you—look, does Sheila know this?—you drank their booze when you were little? You?”
“Hey, that’s what I’m telling you.” Merrick clinks his glass of rye against her spritzer and forges a coy wink, and his whole manner, he can’t help seeing, is lifted from somewhere else—maybe one of those noisy, strobe-lit TV beer ads where a scrum of college jocks flex and guzzle and crack wise along a bar. He can’t be sure. But he does know how much he hates the note of glibness that keeps breezing into his voice—the keynote of so much that he reads these days and almost every party he endures. A note he sometimes picks up and sings in tune with, vaguely ashamed the whole time.
Yet at one time his only shame was solitude, exclusion. A time when he’d have given the hand he earns his bread with, marks with—he’s a physics teacher now—to sing along with the crowd, to be allowed to, to be let in. But not just any crowd. Contemptuous of his grade-school peers, it was Laurel’s tough herd he aspired to, and, somewhere beyond them—through them, really—the grown-up world of his parents’ parties.
Guests are shambling out now, halting and awkward, stooping over to embrace Laurel as if she can’t get up herself, as if she has aged thirty years with the birthday. And—it’s unsaid but hangs smoke-like in the lamp-lit den—the breakup last month. “Call us if we can do something,” a friend says. “I know it’ll be fine.” After all, it was Laurel’s choice and she and Kevin really might “link up again,” the boys, in their mid-teens, are pretty stable for their age, and her career in the civil service is going better than she could have planned.
“The black sheep that made good,” Merrick toasts her—then, out of character, he kills his rye in one go. Trouble of his own these days. He’s broke and even part-time teaching is impossible to find. Funny how things turn out—when they were children it was Merrick who showed all the promise, at least in school.
And now he reminds her of that ironic reversal, to encourage her, he thinks, to cheer her up. Or is it to punish her instead? And what is it that’s pushing him to guide her back down that long-demolished stairway into their childhood rec room, the basement bar where he first tried to drown his childhood self and play the hardened, hard-drinking grown-up, while she already seemed set to inherit the only earth that mattered then: a feral frontier of contraband mickeys and smokes, death’s head roach clips, classes skipped with a shrug, creatively varied expletives, first lays in junior high. Stoners, they were called, nobody sure if that honorific referred to the state they were always
said to be in or to the flooded limestone quarry where they hung out and smoked up and chugged beer and threw themselves naked off the cliffs.
Merrick knows he can’t hold back, he has to talk his sister down that basement stairway, and on a particular day. He starts to speak in his best teacher’s voice—low, soft, even, implacable—and pours them another round.
That afternoon as usual he had been sitting at one of the high ladderback stools that faced the bar: a kidney-shaped counter of faux marble with a brown buttoned vinyl fronting, set at the head of a low, half-finished rec room. Their father had worked episodically two summers before to finish the basement and then, after a brief bender of late-summer use, both parents had drifted back upstairs, where they had wintered and entertained their friends at the larger bar in the fire-warmed family room. No surprise they’d never returned—the baseboard heaters that Dad installed never quite worked, his light fixtures were few and ill-placed, and even in June the light leaking down through the leaf-choked window wells was dull and sullen, the air stagnant, dank. A Bogart poster and a faded Group of Seven print did little to primp up the cheap panelling behind the bar; in the dimness and stillness the print—of a full moon and stars reflected in a northern lake—had a sombre, ominous quality, as if the water had just smoothed out over a violent drowning. Merrick tried not to look at it. Like Bogart in the poster he brooded into his glass or slouched, cue in hand, at the pool table, where the coloured balls glowed in strange, static constellations, like the solar system in Mr. Leung’s model at school.
Merrick liked the muffled gloom of the rec room, especially after school, where the sunlight of the playground and the classroom’s crisp lighting always brought into high relief the smallness, the weakness of those in his grade. And himself. Alone at recess he would claw his way up a drainpipe onto the school’s flat gravelled roof and stand visoring his eyes, squinting over the subdivision and past the limestone quarry until his gaze was snagged and drawn downward by a fluttering toy-fort flag, a tall smokestack and a soaring, spindly aerial like a high ladder reaching nowhere. Laurel’s school. And out beyond it the switchblade glinting of the river, the scarred and furrowed hills.
The Dead Are More Visible Page 11