Burning Down the House (23 page)

At big fires he would do traffic, and if he was too sick even to do that he'd show up in his big extended-cab pickup, bringing flats of pop and bottled water for free from the convenience store he owned. And you could tell by the way his hands moved that he wanted to be doing something, anything at all, but that he was holding himself back because he knew just how much he would have to pay for it later.

TWENTY-TWO

It was an autumn day, a cold holiday that was keeping most people indoors, and when my pager went off, the dispatcher asked for someone from the department to call in.

Usually that meant a nuisance call: someone who thought his neighbour was going to light a bonfire in her backyard during the height of summer when the fir was as dry as candle wicks, someone who thought there might be smoke in his basement or had a ceiling light that was acting funny—and once, a distraught man who had parked his brand new pickup at the top of the boat ramp, opened the hood to put in windshield wiper fluid, and had watched as the truck slipped out of gear and rolled away from him, down into the harbour. The fire chief went to that one—we took turns—and then he called me on the radio to come down and have a look. The owner was still standing there, looking into the water, the windshield wiper fluid bottle between his feet. All we could do was stand on the ramp and look at the $40,000 truck, its chrome glinting brown-silver up through the water at us.

The chief lit a cigarette and studied the completely submerged pickup. Every now and then a thin trickle of silver bubbles would break free from somewhere inside and creep slowly up to the mirror-flat surface of the harbour.

“You'll be needing a diver and a tow truck,” the chief said matter-of-factly, blue smoke curling around his face. “And you'll want to get on it quick, before the gas starts leaking and we have to call the environment department.”

This call, though, wasn't a truck. It was a bird. “Lady wants to talk to you about a parrot,” the dispatcher told me on the phone.

Sometimes you just end up cornered into going, into trying to do something in a situation where you shouldn't even be bothering. I called the woman back, and then I went.

I drove the small pumper alone up to the sports park off the Indian Meal Line, because the call was too pathetic to ignore. The woman on the other end of the line had opened her back door and one of her parrots had escaped. She sounded desperate. She wanted us to come and help her catch it as it flew back and forth through the ragged dark green tops of ranks of spindly spruce trees. I couldn't see calling out an entire fire department for a parrot, but I couldn't just ignore the call, either.

The trees across the road from her house were close together, grey trunks snug tight as if the area had been cut over and all the new trunks had sprung up at the same time, dense and crowded and without gaps. Even though you could only see a couple of yards ahead of you through the trees, there was a peculiar feeling of endlessness— as if the trees went on and on, and that if you pushed through them you would get no closer to, nor farther from, anything. And, somewhere in the woods, a parrot—a small grey parrot with a bright crest that I would occasionally hear calling with a raucous, flat squawk.

I was carrying the small folding ladder that we used to get into attics; it folded in from side to side, and when folded it was only slightly larger around than a two-by-four. Pull the sides apart and the rungs opened on hinges and locked into place. It was narrow enough to fit between the tight trees, and light enough to carry. But every time I unfolded it near a tree where the small parrot was fussing away in the upper branches, the sharp snick of the rungs locking into place frightened the bird away. The few times I did get the ladder up and started to climb, it would slip and I'd tumble off into the tufted green moss and rotted stumps on the forest floor.

At one point I went home and got a dip net that belonged to one of my boys, but I fell onto it early on and it broke.

The woman brought out her other parrot in its cage and set it down in the spruce needles and moss. “Maybe he'll come back when he hears his sister,” she said hopefully.

The second parrot sat motionless in its cage, stubbornly silent. Every now and then it picked up one clawed foot and moved slightly to one side or the other on its perch. Sometimes it would turn its head cockeyed and gnaw on the bars. I remember thinking about what it must be like for the escaped bird, now winging its way around the top of acres of new and unfamiliar ground, and thought in passing that, if I were the escaped parrot, there would be no way in hell you'd ever get me back into that cage.

It was a bright and sunny November day, but it was cool under the trees, and it was clear that the bird wouldn't last the night. Down on the ground the other parrot huddled silent. Eventually the owner put a blanket over the cage and the bird sat there, shrouded, until she took it back in.

While she was in the house, I watched the fire chief's SUV trundle slowly up behind the pumper and park. The chief had heard me radio that I was taking a truck out of the station—you have to put out a radio call so the other firefighters know the truck is out. I had keyed up the radio and said, “Pumper Three leaving Station 257, extra-service call on Indian Meal Line.” Gary had come looking when I hadn't logged the truck back in, probably wondering what sort of thing I'd managed to get myself into. An extra-service call can be anything, big or small, just not a fire or an accident.

Often, extra-service calls are just for advice: about a funny smell or a broken pipe, a dog down over a cliff or kids who might be lost in the woods. We'd done all of those, right down to a woman who had called in a burning smell in her living room after she had electrical work done. It turned out to be a tennis ball that one of her children had dropped into a wall sconce, the hot light bulb slowly eating into the rubber when one of my fire captains finally found it.

Gary had waited to see how long the truck would be out of the station, and when the time stretched over an hour and I hadn't brought it back he'd come out to check.

Sometimes it's a good thing to have someone watching your back. I had once answered a nighttime call about flickering lights where I was met by a woman in a housecoat, clearly with nothing on underneath and no real emergency. The sweep of the chief's headlights across the front of the house had been a welcome interruption to what might have proven a challenging situation.

Gary and I ended up beating our way through the woods for two more hours, listening for the occasional squawk, listening to the bird's owner calling out its name—“Pumpkinseed! Pumpkin-seed!”— over and over and over again. Once the story got around the department, the firefighters would sometimes call out the bird's name as a joke. I'd be in the training house, searching through the smoke for Mr. Heavy's 240-pound pair of overalls, and I would hear the faint, cheerful voice of another firefighter calling to me from the other end of the building: “Pumpkinseed, oh Pumpkinseed . . .” It was a story everyone in the department would end up knowing, the sort of thing that would be repeated by the MC every year at the dinner and dance, the kind of shared experience that binds firefighters together almost as much as the fires and the training.

But the day was getting colder, and it was hard to imagine that a tropical bird would want to do anything but hunker down and fluff up its feathers and try to stay warm. The wind had swung around from the north, and while I hadn't found the parrot I had found a wrecked car and a small clearing with a lean-to made by teenagers, the clearing edged with a circle of beer cans, Kleenex and old condoms. We'd ditched the ladder long before on the side of the road near the truck. Gary, a big man with florid cheeks, had found a boghole that tried to break his ankle.

Once you've agreed to start looking, it's hard to pick the point when you get to stop.

“I wish the damned thing would just die so we could get the hell out of here,” Gary said.

He was walking away from me at that point, into an area of woods where the trees thinned out but where the water table rose abruptly around a small marshy pond. By then our feet were making sucking sounds with each step, and we were both tired.

“Gary—there it is,” I said urgently.

“Where?” he asked, stopping.

“Under your boot.”

Gary actually picked up his foot to look before I told him I was kidding.

Oh, and Pumpkinseed?

For all I know, Pumpkinseed is still on the lam.

The middle of the night during a late summer thunderstorm, we got called out for a lightning strike. At first it was hard to believe that we could actually be called to something as rare as that (especially in coastal Newfoundland, where lightning might come once or twice a summer). But once we were there, lightning strike was written all over the place, and there was no denying it.

You could trace the route of the lightning as if it were a sequence of absolutely straight lines going from point to point to point. The thunder was still grumbling all around us when we pulled up, off in the distance but still seemingly imminent except for the fact that the air had gone suddenly colder, a clear sign the storm had moved on.

The lightning had struck the top edge of a highway rock cut thirty feet high or more, bringing down a truckload of stone that some of the firefighters were busy shovelling into the ditch. From there, the bolt jumped across the road and hit a shed, travelled along the electrical wires into a house and went to ground through the house's electrical panel.

Inside the back door of the house, all along the face of one wall, the electrical wires had simply vaporized, and the wallboard was covered with a layer of copper as thin as gold leaf. I couldn't resist rubbing it with my bare finger, but the layer was so thin and so fine that I couldn't feel the difference between it and the wallpaper.

I wanted to take photographs because it was all just so bizarre. Not for the newspaper, but for the fire department records, where you save up pictures of the weird or the unusual, like a boast book of the freakishly strange, proof that unlikely things really happen.

But the homeowners weren't interested. They'd rather the fire chief and I just hurried up and got out of their back room. Since there wasn't a fire, once the road was completely clear of broken stone we packed up and left. And I wondered if maybe they were worried about whoever it was who had hooked up their electrical service, and whether they also dreaded more questions coming.

TWENTY-THREE

So much of everything is timing, both good and bad. You stop for a moment to pick up a newspaper and you end up in the right place to be T-boned at an intersection by a man who's coming down a long hill in the midst of having a stroke. You take one summer day's drive along a small-town highway, and in the car coming towards you the breeze from the side window lifts copies of a man's resumé and blows them around the inside of his car. As he reaches over to put a hand on the pile to hold the papers down, his car drifts across the yellow line and runs head-on into yours. You run out of onions and a drunk driver smashes into your car, pushing it through a brick wall and right into the corner store, exactly where a woman had been standing, talking on the pay phone, only moments before.

Everything becomes the most complicated kind of what-if question: What if I had taken one more minute to tie my shoes tighter? What if the train had been late, and I hadn't been able to get my permission sheet back to the Wolfville department fast enough? What if I'd missed the first meeting in St. Philip's when the fire department was just starting up?

Should I always be taking the time to tie my shoes tighter?

You start to feel that every single accident, every single error, would be avoidable if you could just find a way to read the pattern in advance—and there has to be a pattern in there somewhere, because it's always so easy to see afterwards.

It's not just the accidents themselves that have a pattern. Even responding to them, you can second-guess every decision you make, because each decision marks a critical change in direction. You can chew up the inside of your head like that, and render it impossible to make any decisions at all. If a house is burning when you get there, you make a deliberate decision to go in or a deliberate decision not to. If you don't make the decision, it ends up being made for you. Sometimes you look back after making the wrong decision and realize that, based on the same information, you would have done exactly the same thing anyway.

Everything connects.

If someone hadn't left their keys in a silver Dodge Caravan when they went into a St. John's convenience store to buy smokes, I wouldn't have found myself trudging up an ever-climbing dirt road that ran from the end of Princess Mountain Drive, heading for a grey slip of rock that stuck out through the carpet of spruce trees that's always been called Greyman's Beard.

It was a Newfoundland summer, well into August, and there was smoke up by Greyman's Beard. The ground had dried so thoroughly under the trees that, when I walked under the canopy, my boots made a hollow thud like I was walking on buried egg crates.

We were rolling to reports of brush fires regularly that year— often just small fires you could basically stomp out with the soles of your boots. There had been forest fires up and down Conception Bay, and the spruce was so dry that walking up through it and brushing the dry branch tips left the air as richly scented as fresh sawdust at a sawmill. A few days earlier, a fire out near Bay Roberts had brought heavy smoke in across miles of water. Clouds of ash—each individual piece shaped like a single fine spruce needle, only grey— had fallen out of the sky like curious and unfamiliar snow, speckling laundry on the line and settling delicately on car windshields.

I headed uphill with a couple of other firefighters, trudging slowly along a dirt road too narrow for the trucks, each of us carrying one of the big, awkward brush fire backpacks of water, while down below the driver of the pumper was waiting to show the forestry truck which way we'd gone.