by Earl Emerson
There’s a busload of witnesses in front of us when I tug on his jacket trying to get him to stop, and he turns around and whips out the toy gun and sticks it in my chest. “Outa my life, motherfucker.”
“That language is just…”
And then there’s an explosion and something hits me in the face, and as I lie there I realize the object that hit me in the face is the sidewalk. And that’s when I hear the bus drive past. It just drives away as if I’m not lying here on the germ-laden sidewalk with Barney licking my ear. Could it be that I’ve had a minor stroke like my brother, Ambrose? I’m going to need a shower before Frontline, because there are millions, if not billions, of germs on your average sidewalk.
I don’t know how many minutes have gone by, but I’m trying to get up when I hear the siren. A vehicle door opens and closes. I hear what sounds like a police radio. A man is next to me on the sidewalk, his voice laced with command. In a small way, it helps cut through the confusion. “You awake, buddy?”
42. TREY SPILLS NO TEARS
JAMIE ESTEVEZ>
Somehow, miraculously, Trey and I have come to the conclusion that the best thing to do tonight is to dine at my place over a plate of pasta while we talk things over. He’s drawn a series of maps and graphs, intricate scenarios of the building and the fire ground on Mylar sheets so that one sheet can be laid on top of another: a timeline of sorts, each sheet in ten-minute increments in the beginning, and then thirty-minute increments for the duration of the fire. It’s incredible work and gives me a picture of the fire as it unfolded, and as I glance at it in the car, I wonder if he might not have made a good living as a graphic artist. Along with the Mylar drawings, he’s composed a list of every firefighter who was at the fire and carefully charted their positions, as far as we know them. All I can figure is he’s been up all night working on this, because much of this information we gleaned only yesterday. And I thought he wasn’t taking our work seriously.
Wednesday night we visited the partially demolished Z Club, a pilgrimage I’d been putting off almost as sedulously as Trey, for we’d been passing within two blocks of it every day. The Z Club was in Columbia City, a multicultural neighborhood, originally a mill town, which had fallen into disrepair by the seventies but had recently been undergoing extensive renovation and rebuilding.
As would be expected, all that was left of the Z Club was a mere shell, the tallest standing walls on the west and north sides. The east side, where the front door and the stairs had been, was leveled almost to the street, so that it resembled a burned-out garage rather than a building that had once been fully enclosed. The only intact portion of the roof was tilted at a crazy angle. Astonishingly, even after three weeks the area reeked of smoke and char.
The parking lot was filled with pyramids of debris and three enormous Dumpsters heaped with charred wood, burned furniture, and artifacts from the fire. Yellow crime-scene tape surrounded what was left of the building, as did a temporary Cyclone fence. What really surprised me, even though I’d seen the news reports, was the plethora of flowers, cards, and beribboned trees. Offerings of teddy bears, dolls, carnations, helium-filled balloons, handwritten notes, gift cards, and other paraphernalia overflowed the site like an infestation, filled up most of the small parallelograms in the Cyclone fencing, and even showed up a block away on telephone poles, trees, and parked cars. Everywhere, we could smell flowers along with the char.
We got out of Trey’s car and stood looking at the rubble, neither of us moving. Finally Trey said, “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?”
“I thought you might feel differently, since you were here when it happened.”
“Why would that be?”
“I just thought there might be something else in your head.”
“My head is full of dead bodies. That’s what my head’s full of.”
“Hard to believe so many people have visited.” Even as I spoke, a large Ford cruised up the narrow street, the occupants craning their necks to view the wreckage of the Z Club. They stopped in the intersection for a few moments, noticed us, and moved on. They were white. We were black. Maybe that had something to do with their leaving. Everybody we’d spoken to in the past two days had mentioned the black-white thing. Every morning in the papers there were angry letters to the editor on both sides of the issue, and the local radio talk shows were buzzing with it.
It had rained, and the sky was damp with clouds.
Trey walked me around the building, showing me where the command post had been, where Engine 33 came in and set up the first hose lines, where Engine 13 parked, and where Engine 28 had ended up in the rear behind the parking lot now filled with debris.
“We came in from Rainier,” Trey said. “Clyde was driving pretty fast. Usually we do a search, but on one side of the building they couldn’t get through the flames and on the other they were driven out by the heat. Then there were all those parked cars behind the building. I wasted a minute or two trying to get some cops to get the civilians out of our hair. They’d been harassing Engine 33, but the smoke started coming out that door and it pushed all the civilians toward us. Finally I told this one guy it was a federal offense to hinder a firefighter at a fire scene.”
“Is it?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. He thought his brother was inside. He said he was either in Wenatchee or in there. I called the IC and asked if anybody’d searched the second floor, but I couldn’t get through on the radio. Too much air traffic. That’s the way it is at a big fire. One person gets on the air for whatever reason, nobody else can use the channel. It’s like a big party line where only one person can talk at a time.”
“What’d you do?”
“You want it all now, standing here in the dusk, maybe rain coming on?”
“If you’re ready to tell it.”
43. THE DEAD MAN IN THE WINDOW
CAPTAIN TREY BROWN, ENGINE 28, C SHIFT>
I’m working with my regular crew, Clyde Garrison and Kitty Acton. The bell hits at 2225 hours, an aid call a few blocks north on Rainier Avenue: man down.
When we arrive, bystanders are staring at a man on the sidewalk, a yapping dog next to him, a large puddle of blood under him. I kneel beside the man, white, in his sixties, Kitty and Clyde behind me with the aid kits. Nobody seems to know what happened to our patient, although several onlookers thought they heard gunshots.
I radio the dispatcher to send us a medic response.
After we put a cervical collar on him, we roll the patient over, cut off his shirt and expose two bullet wounds in his chest; we find no other wounds except for a hematoma on his forehead, probably from falling to the sidewalk. He’s moving good air but only on one side. We assume one of his lungs has collapsed.
As we load our patient onto the stretcher and trundle him into the back of the medic unit, Engine 33 comes roaring up Rainier Avenue and turns west half a block behind us. The two men in the crew cab are dressed for action, in full bunkers and masks, which means it’s a fire call. It should be ours.
A police car pulls up, and one of the officers looks at my captain’s bars and asks what happened. I tell him it’s a shooting, two holes to the chest. He tells me they may have the shooter in the backseat, just as Engine 30 comes racing up Rainier from the north. I hear more sirens in the distance. Clyde yells that they have a fire around the corner.
From the medics I get the okay to go in service, and as we roll, Kitty is already masking up in the crew cab. A fire. A shooting. An arrest. All within blocks of each other. It’s crazy.
I contact the dispatcher and they add us to the fire call.
We drive around the block and arrive at the fire building, where Engine 33 is scrambling to get water on the fire. Two firefighters have masked up and are trying but failing to fight their way into the entrance.
I announce to dispatch and Chief Fish that we’re on scene. The street is full of men, women, children, none with coats, all looking as if they’ve evacuated the building. On channel
1, Chief Fish orders us to go around to the rear of the building and establish Division C. At the back of the building, I dismount and throw a backpack and bottle onto my back, though as a division commander I probably won’t use them. There’s nothing showing on the face of the two-story wall in front of us. No fire. No visible windows or doors. Just a row of cars parked below the wall. Above us smoke is being pumped from under the eaves of the roof.
I spot a row of boarded-over windows on the second floor painted the same color as the wall. Although the parked cars are blocking access to most of the windows, I tell Kitty and Clyde to throw up a ladder between a pair of cars where there’s enough room to squeeze one in.
I give a report to Chief Fish, telling him we’ve got no fire on this side. Heavy smoke out the eaves. No access.
While Kitty foots the ladder, Clyde climbs up and pulls the plywood off the window with the axe. Black smoke boils out the window frame, and Clyde climbs back down the ladder, coughing. He’s halfway down the ladder when a man appears in the window above him, blind from smoke and panic. Despite my shouts for him to wait, he climbs up onto the window frame and steps into space. He catches a foot on the ladder and plummets to the ground, doing half a somersault and brushing Clyde, who is still on the ladder, so that he lands on his head at the base of the ladder.
“Backboard and C-collar?” Clyde asks, but by this time there’s another man in the window, and I tell Clyde to go back up and get him. The broken man at our feet is in semiformal clothes, good shoes, and an expensive watch, and it worries me. He’s dressed for a party. People don’t usually go to parties alone. I call for a medic unit and more manpower for rescues, but I can tell by the bonking tone my portable radio makes that my transmission isn’t getting through. I wait and try three more times before my transmission is received. The delay makes me crazy.
By the time I get the message across, Clyde has helped a heavyset young man onto the ladder and I’ve spotted two more heads in the smoky window, each of which disappears. Now I’m wondering how many people are up there. And then deep inside the building, I see the oily dark orange express train that signals heavy flame. It will roll across the ceiling until it builds up, and then it will descend and wither everything in its path.
To my left, another window pops out and another body falls toward a parked car with the jagged motion of a bird that’s been shot out of the sky, almost striking two firefighters who are probably on their way to report to me. I don my face piece, activate my air supply, put on both gloves, and race up the ladder just as Clyde and his victim clear the bottom rungs. Clyde is hacking from the smoke, and the victim is limp from it, a male dressed as if for a night out—gold chains, a gold watch, and his best Nikes. Kitty is examining the man in the heap at the bottom of the ladder, who I suspect is dead.
“I’ll pitch, you catch,” I say to Clyde as I scramble up the ladder and dive inside the window, landing on a pair of soft bodies. I’m wearing full turnouts, rubber boots, and a mask with forty-five minutes of compressed air in the bottle on my back. I can see the space is heating up and about to flash over. If memory serves me right, we are in a huge space with a high ceiling, so there is plenty of room above me for hot gases to build and produce a flashover larger than anything I’ve ever encountered.
“Fire department!” I yell so people can find me by my voice. “Fire department!”
I see nothing but smoke and some flame maybe twenty feet above my head and the dim outlines of the window I’ve just come through. I find a woman on her knees almost directly below the window. I encircle her torso with my arms and lift. I get her to the window and help her out. She is semiconscious, and I suspend her over the ladder while Clyde, still coughing, climbs up to assist. Even with Clyde’s help, it’s touch and go getting her out safely. I can hear the flame ripping behind me, can feel the superheated smoke blasting out the window. Can feel another body on the floor bumping into me repeatedly like a trapped bumblebee slapping the sides of a jar.
I reach down for the victim at my side just as somebody else crashes into me. “Where’s the fire department?” she says, and continues on.
“Back here,” I call out. “Right here.”
The body I’ve got in my hands now is a male, but he’s too big to lift. He’s probably too big for two people to lift. I try, but it’s like trying to pick up a three-hundred-pound bag of Jell-O. He’s been crawling but has collapsed in place. Meanwhile, the woman comes back and embraces me. I help her to the window and she’s saying, “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” I put her on the ladder just behind Clyde and the first victim, who have made little progress.
“Move it!” I yell. “This place is loaded with customers.” Behind me I hear women screaming.
“Over here!” I yell at the two screaming women, now three screaming women, now four. “Up here! Fire department.” The screams are coming from a lower level of the little theater. I hear footsteps on the wooden floor, lots of footsteps. There are more people than I expected. I can’t hear any firefighting efforts, only a dull roar from a rapidly approaching fire overhead. I’ve never been in a situation with this much potential fire above me or so many people to rescue, but I know this: the larger the space, the larger the flashover, so that the puny residential flashovers I’ve survived in the past by flattening myself on the floor will seem like nothing when this thing melts me into a puddle of wax and teeth.
“Up here!” I shout.
A woman crashes into me, mumbling, and without stopping to think, I hoist her out the window. She shrieks with the suddenness of it. There are already three people on the ladder, and they’re moving slowly. “Get another ladder,” I shout to a firefighter who’s shown up in the parking area below us, even though I have no idea where he might place another ladder, and even though it will be too late for the woman in my arms.
The woman begins to slip from my grasp. I lean out the window and lower her as far as the combined length of our arms can reach, so that her toes are only seven feet or so from the hood of a Honda. I let her go and hear the crumpling of sheet metal as she slams into the car. Another woman is at the window beside me. I pick her up and drop her onto a second car.
I call out, grab a man shuffling past in the smoke, manhandle him out the window, and drop him as delicately as you can drop a man out a second-story window. It is starting to get really hot.
I drop another victim. And another. I begin to lose track. I am breathing heavily with the work, sweating so that I’m soaked in my turnouts. Some of them resist, but they are blinded and incapacitated by the smoke. Somebody grabs me in a stranglehold the way a drowning victim grabs a rescuer, but I head-butt her to the floor, readjust my face piece, which she’s knocked ajar, and drop her out the window. She lands on the hood of a car, where her head cracks the windshield.
Feeling around in the smoke, I listen to footsteps pounding on the wooden floor in distant sections of the building. We have less than a minute before I will be forced to leave. Maybe less than thirty seconds. I’m taking a risk just being here. I don’t want to be here when it flashes. But then, neither do these people.
I call out and then fumble for more bodies and sling them out the window as quickly as possible, placing only one or two on the ladder, which seems to be full each time I need it.
And then I find myself engulfed in flame.
I’ve timed it badly and have been caught in the flashover, and I’m curled up on the floor below the window, at least I think I’m below the window. I’m disoriented. The only sound is the roar of the flame as it descends on me. Slowly I scoot backward, trying to wedge myself into the corner under the window, but the farther I scoot, the more I begin to suspect I’m moving in the wrong direction. Everywhere I look I see orange and black and nothing else. I’m being burned through my turnouts. Baked like a potato.
I crawl to where I hope the window is, reach up, but grasp only smoke, not even the wall. Now I’ve lost the wall and don’t know which direction to go. I crawl anoth
er foot or two and bump into a body on the floor. For all I know, I’m heading deeper into the building. A quick touch tells me the body is the obese man I’ve been bypassing, the one who’s too heavy to lift. He groans, “Help me.” Ironically, the position of his body acts like the needle on a compass, because I remember his legs were pointing toward the window. I follow his legs.
“Get up, buddy,” I yell, but he doesn’t stir, and he’s too big for me to move without his assistance. Flame comes down like a sheet blowing in the wind, and I can feel it through my turnouts, and then in one swift movement I squirm over the windowsill like an otter sliding into a pond and ooze down the ladder face-first, gripping the beams on either side and braking with my gloved hands, sliding two stories to the parking lot, a technique we’ve practiced in training.
When I get up off the pavement, flame is shooting out the window above me. I’ve got some minor burns under my turnouts, but I’ll survive, which is more than I can say about the man I’ve been forced to abandon upstairs. How many others are up there with him won’t be known for hours.
44. CAPTAIN BROWN FINDS CAUSE TO REEVALUATE ETERNITY
CAPTAIN TREY BROWN, ENGINE 28, C SHIFT>
The night is nothing but confusion. I don’t want anybody to know about my minor burns, through my turnouts, because once they find out, I’ll be relieved of my post and sent to the hospital. By now everybody realizes there are still people in the building.
I keep thinking about the man I left inside. I’ll never forget those few minutes in the smoke or his words, “Help me,” and somehow, whether I want it to or not, I know it will forever affect the way I think about the world and life. But for now we’re still on the fire ground, still humping hose and working the logistics of which crews will do what, cycling firefighters through rehab and back to the trenches.
The ground and the hoods of cars are littered with broken bodies, shattered windshields, and civilians who’ve escaped the building limping through the melee, shouting out the names of missing friends who have not. Sweaty firefighters in full turnouts are helping the injured, ten or twelve of them now, trying to move the battered victims away from the fire building before they get injured by falling debris.