Burning Down the House (14 page)

Off to my right, the brown and white house went dark, but inside the van the music carried on, the lights from the ambulance and all the other trucks playing across the interior even more brightly. The moon stayed lit too, staring down like another rubbernecker.

Then the paramedics piled in, and they're lucky enough to be always working in pairs. One opened the driver's door, the other pushing in beside me and into the space between the two front seats. The first thing they did was turn the radio off.

One paramedic opened the man's shirt and rubbed his chest roughly, saying, “Hey! Hey! You awake, sir? Have you been drinking, sir?” The man kept mumbling under his breath and moving his arms slightly. With head injuries, sometimes they get violent. But this driver wasn't violent. He wasn't waking up either, not for us.

When they had the neck collar on him, I could move my hands, could get out of the van and stretch. I was all knotted up, like when you've seen a really good movie and forgotten to shift your weight around, so that when the lights come back up your legs twitch and tingle with pins and needles, remembering again what it's like to move.

I recognized the driver, a local entertainer whom I knew by reputation. He probably wouldn't recognize me, particularly since he was never really conscious enough to know much of anything. It's disturbing to be that close to someone—holding the sides of his face for half an hour or so—and know that afterwards you just fade back into the night, knowing also that you're lugging someone else's embarrassing secrets around in your back pocket, where they have to stay.

When the ambulance left and the wrecker came, I climbed in my truck and peeled off the rubber gloves. There's an established method for taking off gloves. A little pictogram in the manual shows you how to take them off smoothly, without touching whatever was on the outside of them, and then leave them in a little self-contained knot to boot, so they can't infect anyone else. I dropped the small bundle they made in the coffee cup holder next to my gearshift.

I drove home, pulled in the driveway, turned the truck off, the headlights too, and sat there in the driver's seat until the moon was long gone and the horizon started to blue. Better prepared than I'd been at fourteen, and just as unable to know if anything I did actually made a difference.

The next morning, when I came out to drive to work, the gloves were still there, lying limp like the discarded, forgotten skins of some strange reptile. Looking at them, I could still feel whisker stubble on my hands.

Three cars came together right in front of the convenience store, and one was forced sideways off the road and up the three concrete steps, breaking through the tan brick wall by the door and smashing into the back of the ATM.

We commandeered the store, and there were injured people sitting on upturned milk cartons in the aisles. We went from one to another, checking their vitals over and over, around and around in a small circle, waiting for the ambulances.

Except for the guy who looked like he was having a heart attack. Him we had stretched out on a backboard between the pop cooler and the potato chips, and one of the firefighters was with him full-time, trying to stop the bleeding from a gash on his forehead over his eye.

Meanwhile, the store clerk didn't move from behind the counter with the cash register, as if she thought we had all come in to buy first aid supplies, gloves and pressure bandages, and she kept waiting even though not one of us went up to the counter. She watched us as if we were doing something as straightforward as gathering up an armful of frozen peas and orange juice and a tub of ice cream, filling our baskets.

TWELVE

The prevailing wisdom has always been that you work people in slow. New firefighters are sometimes called probies, because they're on probation, still learning, and they get to do all the simple tasks— fetching tools, doing traffic control, packing hose back on the truck. The logic is, if you ease them in, they'll stay longer. It's good for the department; I'm not so sure it's good for every firefighter.

When you're twenty, you don't know that. I also didn't know that I was collecting information I wouldn't understand for years. Things happened in a particular order—they only began to make sense much later.

On a hot summer day with a great high blue bowl of Annapolis Valley sky up above us, we were heading for an unmistakable black, roiling column of smoke up ahead. Another brand new fireman, a young guy named Meerman who didn't stay with the department long, was with me on the back of the pumper, and we could yell back and forth over the big diesel. His dad was one of the veteran firefighters, the guys who hold on for decades without getting so much as a mark on them—the guys who seemed to be able to wash it all off like it was never going to last long enough to stain.

We saw the smoke when the truck took a turn to the left and headed straight towards it. I know the spot on the road still; there's a big dairy barn off to the right and a long sloping hill with a vineyard on the left, the vines small and ordered and clipped carefully into their straight lines, all their faces turned directly up to the sun. I can describe the place for other Wolfville firefighters, but it wouldn't necessarily make sense to anyone else: the fire was on the same turn where a motorcycle went sideways through a telephone pole and left the pole standing with just a notch taken out of it; on the same road but several miles past where a big sooty ember from a chimney fire burned a perfectly round hole in the expensive living room carpet at a jeweller's house. He'd circled around us, hopping mad, as we cleaned up.

You can sit at an accident scene, listening on the radio as the other trucks rumble towards you with no clear knowledge of where the scene is, and key up the radio to tell them, “It's on Witchhazel, just past the house with the toy windmill where the blue-haired kid crashed the van,” and that's precise enough for the people who share that memory. And enough to make everyone who was there recall one of the firefighters taking a quick look at the kid's multiple piercings and yelling, “Double gloves, double gloves,” as if the presence of a nose ring was a sure sign of AIDS.

Riding on the back step of the pumper when I started fighting fires was supposed to give me a couple of privileges. It earned me first crack at forced entries, using the axes that sat, heads down, in the axe pockets next to the back bumper. And if I was lucky enough to be on the right side of the tailgate, gripping the long chrome handhold with my left hand, it meant that I was supposed to get the nozzle. In Wolfville, the attack line, the first hose off the truck, used to lie on the right-side bed of Pumper Three, packed so that two long loops stuck out. At the scene, the firefighter put his arm through the loops and pulled the hose straight out—and if you spilled the hose off the truck, you were supposed to get to fight the fire too.

The truck was barely stopped when I had my arm through the hose. A grey van was completely ablaze, glass already blowing out of the windows, scattering in tiny squares that gritched under my boots. The van's owner had been moving an old camper trailer from one campground to another, and hadn't bothered to chain the trailer to the hitch. Then he'd hit a bump while slowing to make a turn, the hitch socket had jumped off the ball of the trailer hitch, and the tongue of the trailer had gone straight through the van's gas tank, driven in by the weight of the trailer.

“I looked in the rear-view and the whole back of her was up in flames,” the driver told me, and then he turned and told the fire captain the exact same thing.

He had gotten the van stopped on one side of the road, but the trailer had its own plans. Unhitched, it had wobbled away in a straight line and stationed itself perfectly in a parking lot in front of an apple stand on the apex of the turn.

I put one foot on the ground and the other on the bumper, just like we were trained, and grabbed the hose—and Al MacDonald, coming around from the jump seat on the front of the pumper, reached out and pulled my arm back out of the loop of hose. He did it gently, the way you might take a pencil from between a child's fingers to show him how to form letters.

“You get the pike pole ready and come over when we need you to hold the hood up,” he said, taking the nozzle right out of my hand, yanking the hose and heading to the van with a practised ease that showed he'd done it a hundred times before. As unfair as it seemed at the time, that's the way it's supposed to work—especially with new firefighters.

Then a burning tire on the van exploded, and all of the firefighters— even the captain—dropped to the ground as if they'd been shot.

All the firefighters, that is, except me and Meerman. We just stood there blinking.

Another year in and I would have known enough to drop to the pavement with the same boneless efficiency, and without a hint of embarrassment either. That, at least, only leaves you covered with dirt, and you can always brush dirt off.

By the time I was a deputy chief and training firefighters of my own in Portugal Cove–St. Philip's, I knew how important it was to ease them in carefully. But that wasn't the way it worked for my first pair of new firefighters: two youngsters fresh out of high school, the kind of firefighters who would do just about anything you asked them to. The kind of firefighter I was when I started.

We were called to a house on a cul-de-sac I'd never been on, looking for a place that turned out not even to have a street number. I've heard of fire departments giving out house numbers for free, just to make things simpler when they are called. It turned out to be the house with the front door left open, a big cream-coloured two-storey with loads of space for the old woman who lived there. The kind of house that used to have a family but that emptied out in a dozen ways, leaving only one inhabitant, marking time.

One inhabitant. And then none.

The White Woman.

She was a stick, a wraith, a sliver of a woman, a woman who had the look of having aged by simply shrinking and drying out. She was, by then, well under one hundred pounds, and her house—or at least her living space—had contracted the same way she had. It was a big-enough place, a sprawling house with formal dining and living rooms, but just by passing the doorways you could tell these rooms weren't used anymore. Glass-fronted cases held a silver tea set and a row of serving platters, tarnished blue-black from disuse. The living room looked like a still life: all of the tables were clear except for a small cut glass bowl with white mints, every piece of furniture clean and square in its spot, and empty. Unwrinkled, unmarked, undented.

Only the kitchen and the small television room looked lived in. Back there, the rooms were bright with the yellow light of incandescent bulbs, a television on and chattering, the volume loud. It was a large country kitchen with brown cabinet doors, a long beige countertop and a sink full of dirty dishes. A big serrated breadknife balanced on the edge of the sink, butter smeared near the tip of the blade. Details such as that knife stick in my memory for no particular reason, and have a way of cropping up like defining moments— as if a dirty knife in some way proved the carelessness of the nurse who was there to tend to the old woman. Really, it proved nothing of the kind.

The kitchen had a breakfast nook that looked out into the front yard, all windows, cut up in small square mullions. An inexpensive dark table, the top covered with a white runner and a bunch of open magazines. It must have been a bright room in daylight, despite the large evergreen hedge rising up along the bottom of the window. The rest of the space held, against one wall, a large recliner and, against the other, a short bookcase with a small television. On it, a game show, the contestants busily picking the right prices.

By then, she may well have been spending all of her nights in the chair down there. Go to enough medical calls and you'll see that it's hardly unusual, old people living in their own homes but chained to one ground-floor room, one chair, one very small and defined universe. Nothing about that fragile husk of a woman suggested she could climb the stairs anymore.

She was stretched out flat on the floor, and my two newest firefighters had already used the blunt-nosed scissors to cut open the front of her ivory flannel nightie and were doing CPR.

No one would ever want to be seen like that. It's bad enough to feel exposed, to turn around naked and see a lover looking at you in a way that makes you feel fleetingly ashamed; it's worse to be laid out without the ability to cover yourself with your own hands. I know that people take refuge in the concept that firefighters are professionals, and we are—we're not voyeurs, not disaster junkies, and we are there to help—but it doesn't mean we don't have eyes or feelings. It doesn't mean we don't see you, because we do—but we take our own sorts of refuge. It's easier to look at people as if they are actually a loose collection of parts, the way a car is doors and fenders and hood and mirrors. It's dehumanizing, but it works. You just pick the part you're working on and push all the rest deliberately out of your field of vision.

Clinically, procedurally aware, I could see every ripple of flesh, every feature from nipple to ancient stretch mark. The sight was raw and explicit; and years later I can gather it up into a mental picture without a moment's hesitation. It encapsulated the cold difference between the words
naked
and
nude
. Naked—stripped— exposed—revealed: she was all of that, right there splayed in front of us in her last few moments alive, if she still really counted as alive. Her skin was the colour of bond paper and her lips slate grey, because there was almost no blood left in her.

The paramedics arrived a few minutes later. They scattered equipment like a small and damaging cyclone: packages were ripped open and dropped, needles stripped out of their plastic sleeves, IV bags handed to firefighters who then became bystanders, their only purpose to hold the plastic bags of fluid in the air while the paramedics worked. Paramedics fly apart. While firefighters are trained to do things such as salvage—stretching drop cloths over furniture to keep water from dripping down and ruining the finish—paramedics just plain don't give a damn. They have one job, emergency medicine, and that's the job they're going to do. Messy work: what was left of the woman vomited up black, ropy blood as the paramedics continued with CPR, clots that smeared to a bright red on her kitchen linoleum.