Earl W. Emerson

by The smoke room: a novel of suspense

  Bob Oleson transferred his equipment from our crew cab to the chief ’s Suburban, and we all left the station.

  Fire Station 14 sat on the reclaimed tide flats in the industrial area just south of downtown Seattle and was a working fire house as well as the training center for the department. Drill schools were conducted in the classroom inside the station and on the court in back. As we drove, I could hear Johnson and Tronstad griping that it was getting dark, and

  T H E S M O K E R O O M

  95

  that Abbott wasn’t drilling any other companies. That this was some sort of revenge. That Abbott was a butthole.

  “Where did he even get that bond?” Tronstad asked. Johnson said, “There isn’t any chance he got one of the bags, is there, Gum? You didn’t do something stupid like hide them in the hose tower?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Shit,” said Tronstad. “Sears promised he’d keep this between him and us. I can’t see him breaking a confidence. He’s too buttoned-down for that.”

  “I think it’s weird that Abbott took Oleson back to Thirty-two’s,” said Johnson. “After he drills us, how’s he going to get us back in service with only three guys? Are we going to go pick up Oleson again? Why not include Oleson in the drill?”

  “He doesn’t want witnesses,” said Tronstad. I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.

  Station 14 was an off-pink building with red barn doors and a tile roof that looked as if it belonged in Southern California. While Fourth Avenue in front of the station was busy with truck traffic, Horton Street along the south side of the station was a dead end that provided a wide access to the drill court behind the station. I’d driven there every weekday for twelve weeks of drill school, where I had marched and worked and fallen on that drill court in the rain and heat until I thought I couldn’t stand up any longer. I’d put up hundreds of ladders to the seven-story training tower and hooked up to the hydrants too many times to count. When we pulled into the parking area behind the station, it was just after seven in the evening, so we’d missed the ongoing recruit class by an hour. The pavement was still damp from the hose drills they’d been doing all day. Off to the side, three reserve rigs were parked and tarped for the weekend.

  Behind Station 14 was a wide-open parking area maybe 200 feet by 150, bordered on the west by the rear of the fire station, on the north by a fence and a tin-walled manufacturing facility of some sort, on the east by railroad tracks and a Metro bus route, on the south by Horton Street, and across that a pest control facility. Beside the door stood a 96

  E A R L E M E R S O N

  seven-story tower with no glass in the windows and a fire escape on one side; the tower rose eighty feet.

  You could smell the pungent odor of smoke as we drove up, a smell that brought back sharp memories of my first twelve weeks in the department. The smoke room. In my recruit school we’d done it five weeks in a row, always on a Friday so recruits would have Saturdays and Sundays to recover.

  Situated at the bottom of the tower, the smoke room was a small, concrete-walled room that always reeked. After the third or fourth week of recruit school the instructors would haul a burn barrel into the room, set a fire in it, then, after the fire got hot, stoke it down in order to produce as much smoke as possible. The windows would be shuttered. The door sealed. An instructor in full self-contained breathing apparatus, SCBA, would tend the fire. In groups at first, and then alone, recruits would be herded into the room, the door shut behind them. The first exposure would be a minute. In later weeks it would be two minutes. In order to make certain recruits weren’t holding their breath, they would be forced to answer questions and perform tasks such as looking for a bolt on the floor. You quickly learned the best air was low, maybe an inch off the concrete floor, and you just as quickly learned to crawl with your face on the floor, even if somebody in front of you had puked. The rules were simple. If you couldn’t handle the smoke room, you were dismissed. In my class two recruits had been given the boot because they failed this bizarre job hurdle.

  Even though we wore SCBAs at fires, there was always the possibility the SCBA would fail or you would get lost or trapped and your air would run out. The department needed to know you weren’t going to panic when the smoke got thick. Yo u needed to know you weren’t going to panic. Your partners needed to know.

  I couldn’t help thinking about my drill school experiences as Johnson parked the rig and the three of us walked to the back door of Station 14.

  “They must be on a run,” Johnson said, glancing at the empty beanery windows.

  “I didn’t hear them on the radio,” I said.

  T H E S M O K E R O O M

  97

  Tronstad ducked into the tower while Johnson thumbed the combination lock on the back door. A moment later Tronstad stuck his head out the second-floor window of the tower and said, “Hey, guys. Check it out. They left the burn barrel going.”

  “They’re supposed to clean all that up,” I said. “We always did.”

  “The guys on Ladder Seven are going to be pissed when they get back,” said Johnson. “The last thing they want to do is come out here and clean up after a bunch of recruits.”

  The other two went to the TV room on the first floor while I walked to the watch desk at the front of the station and learned from the day book that Ladder 7 and Aid 14 were attending a first-aid class at Station 25. They would be gone for hours.

  In the TV room, Tronstad flipped through the channels with the remote while Johnson and I speculated on what drills Abbott would throw at us. The department had a whole roster of preprogrammed drills, much like football plays, in which each member on the apparatus played a specific role.

  “Hell,” said Tronstad, tuning in a lingerie show on one of the cable channels, “there’s only seven or eight basic hose lays. How can you forget ’em?”

  “You should be going over these with us,” said Johnson.

  “Not me. I’m a millionaire. Or I will be tomorrow when Doublemint hands over those bags.”

  It was almost fifteen minutes later when the back door to the station opened and Chief Abbott popped his head into the TV room. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Like convicts behind a guard, we followed him down the dark hallway and outside, where smoke was drifting out the lower tower windows and spreading across the twilight-dampened drill court. In the eastern sky the last of the day’s sun reflected off the high clouds.

  “Just coats, helmets, and gloves,” said the chief. The three of us walked over to Engine 29 and put on our gear, then walked back to where Chief Abbott stood with his hands behind his back. He wore his bunking coat and helmet as if he were going to perform 98

  E A R L E M E R S O N

  along with us, although we knew he wasn’t. He rocked back on his heels and then up on his toes, eyeballing us each in turn, his gray eyes bulging like grapes.

  He stared at us for a few seconds. “I’ve got something new here. I had Training leave that burn barrel for us.”

  “Really?” said Johnson. “We thought somebody was in trouble.”

  “Somebody is in trouble,” I whispered. “Us.”

  “Okay. Upstairs,” said Abbott.

  When I headed for the stairs at the base of the tower, Johnson said,

  “We have to know what drill we’re doing, don’t we?”

  Tronstad touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Figure it out, Robert.”

  Johnson and Abbott stared at each other until it became clear to Johnson. “I ain’t doin’ it,” he said. “You can’t make us.”

  “I can make you do up and overs,” said Abbott. “I can make you lay every foot of goddamn hose you’ve got on that rig, and then I can make you lay it again. I can keep you here all night long! That’s what I can do!”

  In drill school an “up and over” meant running up the stairs of the seven-story tower and down the fire escape, a steel ladder that dropped straight to the ground—or, if the instructors felt
peevish, up the fire escape and down the stairs. It was an evolution where a mistake could drop a recruit eighty feet onto concrete. In drill school up and overs were done three times a day and were frequently used for punishment. It got so that scrambling down a seven-story fire escape at full speed meant nothing. But then, that was the point.

  “You don’t mind, Chief, I’ll do the up and overs. Tell me when to stop,” Tronstad said, heading up the stairs at a jog-trot. Abbott barked after him, “Run, buddy. We don’t walk our up and overs.”

  Johnson gave me a long look. I knew how much heights disagreed with him, how he’d forced himself to deal with it during drill school, and how he swore he would never get on a roof or climb a fire escape again if he could avoid it. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen to work at Station 29, where most of our fires were in single-story residences.

  “Chief?” Johnson said. “I don’t ever recall any firefighter past probation being asked to go in the smoke room.”

  T H E S M O K E R O O M

  99

  “You don’t think it’s legal?”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “You can step into the room with the kid here, or you can call your union rep after I write charges on you. Your choice.”

  Like a couple of reluctant adolescents trudging into the gym teacher’s office for a paddling, we marched up the stairs to the smoke room, which was situated between floors one and two, Abbott on our heels. Outside the closed door Abbott pulled out a stopwatch on a knotted shoestring. Holding his breath, he opened the heavy metal door with one hand and said,

  “It’s only one minute. Get in quick. I don’t want to let that smoke out.”

  I stepped into the small concrete room and turned to the chief. “I’ll do the up and overs.”

  “Too late,” said Abbott, pushing Johnson into me. “Too damn late.”

  The door closed with a metallic clank, and we were submerged in darkness and smoke. It was as if we’d been put in a dungeon. Straining not to inhale, I turned on my flashlight but couldn’t see much except grayness. When I finally took a breath, I felt that old familiar feeling that I was being smothered with a dirty pillow, as if my lungs had been stuffed with wool gloves.

  15. PUSHED IN, SEALED UP, FUCKED OVER

  W ANYB ODY WHO ’S BEENon the wrong side of a campfire when the wind switches directions has a hint of what the first two or three seconds in the smoke room are like. After those first few seconds, though, things grow exponentially worse in a way that is almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through it. The moment you realize you’re not getting out is the moment you begin to think you’re dying. Thirty seconds seem like half an hour, and a minute seems like a week. You choke and your eyes water and your nose runs, and if you’re not smart, you cough, and when you do that you inhale quickly and take in more smoke, which makes you cough again, and then you get into a cycle where it feels as if someone’s taken a chainsaw to your lungs. Some say it’s as bad as being forced to breathe underwater. You crawl around on your stomach searching for that one good, clean patch of air that hasn’t been saturated with carbon monoxide and soot. You try to move to the doorway to get the scant fresh air oozing in under the crack, but there’s always somebody in front of you, somebody with his face pressed up against the door. Tonight that somebody was Robert Johnson. The worst part isn’t that you think you’re dying. The worst part is that you are dying, that you are in the first stages of death by CO poisoning. It becomes a test of will. You hold on because others before you have held on. Because the instructors and other recruits are waiting for you to crack, and you’re determined not to give them that satisfaction. You hold on because your career depends on it. Strangest of all, you hold on because you know it’s good for you. You know that someday as a firefighter you may end up in a situation where you’re trapped in smoke and where you’ll grasp on to that hairsbreadth of difference between surviving and dying, that you’ll survive because this experience gave you the framework, the reference point to persevere instead of panic. You do it because

  T H E S M O K E R O O M

  101

  it’s necessary. But that was in drill school. We’d already proved ourselves, every one of us.

  “This is bullshit,” said Johnson as soon as the door closed. “We’re not recruits.” When I joined him on the floor, I pressed the light button on my watch and took note of the second hand.

  I took a quick circuit of the ten-by-twelve-foot room and rejoined Johnson at the door, trying not to inhale. “How long?” Johnson asked, strangling on the words.

  “Twenty seconds.”

  “Fuck.”

  We knew every time we took smoke we were shortening our lives, dumping poisons into our lungs, liver, and kidneys, increasing our chances of heart disease and cancer. This was bullshit. Abbott had exceeded his authority, and it pissed me off, too.

  Outside the door, we heard Tronstad run past, calling out the floors as he passed each, as was the custom. You could tell from the amount of air he had behind his voice that he was dogging it. I glanced at my watch again. We’d been inside a minute now, and even though we were “cheating” by scooping up what little fresh air filtered in under the door, we were also dying, especially Johnson, who was beginning to breathe in small gulping hiccups. “One minute,” I announced.

  “Okay. That’s enough,” Johnson said loudly. “We’re coming out now!”

  Without removing his face from the sweet spot at the base of the door, Johnson reached up and fumbled for the knob. When he continued to fumble, I sat up and pulled hard on the door. It didn’t budge.

  “It’s stuck.”

  “It’s stuck, Chief,” Johnson shouted. “Let us out. The door’s stuck!”

  I was sure Abbott could hear the panic in Robert Johnson’s voice. Maybe this was easier for me because I’d been through drill school more recently. Or because I was younger.

  It was then that the minimal quantities of fresh air that had been flowing under the door were shut off. When I turned on my flashlight I could see Chief Abbott had blocked the crack under the door with a rag or his coat.

  102

  E A R L E M E R S O N

  “You boys getting a good taste of it?” Abbott asked from the other side of the metal door.

  “Chief ! Chief ?” Johnson pounded on the door, his blows thunderous in my ears, which were close to the door. “Chief. Let us out of here. Damn it, let us out!”

  “Maybe now you’ll tell me where you got that bearer bond?” Abbott asked.

  “Wha—?”

  “That bearer bond. And all the other bearer bonds. How many do you have?”

  “Chief ?”

  “Talk to me, boys. You’re in there. I’m out here. It’s going to stay this way until you tell me about the bonds.”

  Johnson started crying.

  “Think it over. I’ve got all night. Your time may be limited.”

  I looked at my watch. “It’s been two minutes, Chief.”

  “You pussies aren’t going to wimp out on me, are you?”

  “Let us out,” gasped Johnson.

  “Not until you tell me what I want to know.”

  “This is crazy!” Johnson wailed. The panic lacing his voice would only encourage Abbott. “Let us out of here. We didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Tronstad took them bonds.” The talking was too much for Johnson, who erupted into a series of loud, wracking coughs. My lungs were like sandpaper, and I was pretty close to coughing myself. I’d been trying to conserve energy, but the fact that we were locked in created a panic I’d never felt in drill school, where you could cry uncle whenever you wanted, then afterward go upstairs to the training chief ’s office and sign a resignation form. There had always been a way out. Tonight the only way out was past Abbott.

  I tried the knob again, but the door was frozen. We were going on three and a half minutes. The longest I’d ever stayed
in the smoke room was two minutes, and that had kicked my butt.

  T H E S M O K E R O O M

  103

  I began pounding on the door, hoping Tronstad would hear it when he ran past.

  Johnson managed to suppress his coughing long enough to say,

  “Tronstad was the one. Tronstad—” I shouldered him hard, knocking him over, leaning into him with all my weight.

  “Shut up,” I whispered. “We’re not going to tell him a thing.”

  “He’s killing us, Gum. I got to.”

  “Not like this.”

  After a twenty-second silence, Abbott said, “You guys still in there?”

  Neither of us moved or spoke.

  “Gum? Johnson? You guys okay?”

  Moments later the door opened slowly. I scooted out onto the concrete landing while Johnson piled out on top of me. The concrete hurt my knees, but I scrambled to the stairs, where a light breeze from the north kept the smoke off us. Suddenly we were breathing the cool Seattle night air again.

  Hacking and slobbering as if he’d been Maced, Johnson sat on the concrete step beside me. I could hear the asthma acting up in his lungs. I didn’t feel so hot myself. We’d been inside just under five minutes. Chief Abbott had secured the inward-opening door with a rope, one end around the handle, the other around his waist. The look of delight in his eyes made me want to knock him down.

  “So. Let’s hear about the bonds.”

  Johnson coughed. I remained teary-eyed, snot-nosed, and silent.

  “We made a deal, men. I let you out. You talk.”

  The effects of carbon monoxide don’t hit you all at once. My first month out in the company, we had a fire victim with CO poisoning who was talking to us, said he felt fine, and died ten hours later in the hospital. It remained to be seen how sick we were.

  Tronstad climbed down the last few rungs of the fire escape on the outside of the building, then jogged up to where we were blocking the steps, a look of incredulity on his face. “Jesus fucking Christ. How long were they in there, Chief ?”