Burning Down the House (27 page)

I used to be sure that I could help—I used to be sure that just doing
something
would help. I still wanted to—God, I wanted to— but I couldn't.

I just didn't think I could help anyone.

Not even myself.

Especially not myself.

The caller told 911they had seen the red cat's-eye reflection of tail lights where there weren't supposed to be tail lights, caught by their headlights and out away from the road and on a steep hill down into Portugal Cove. The caller wasn't concerned enough to stop, though, so we had to take a couple of trips down the hill before we found the car, sunk down into the trees below the guardrail.

The young driver had miscalculated the turn, missed the start of the guardrail, and had launched the car out over an incline and into a stand of fir trees. Looking under it with the flashlights, we could see that the back wheels were on the ground, and the front wheels were in the air. However it had happened, the top of a huge fir tree had come straight through the windshield, a tree trunk four inches across going right through the gap between the driver's seat and the passenger seat like a spear and straight out through the back window. The entire car was packed tight with the bushy branches and with the thick, rich smell of the fir, and it seemed like someone had tried to bring a Christmas tree home by stuffing it completely inside their car. Any door you opened, tree branches burst out like a jack-in-the-box.

I could only imagine what it would have been like for the driver, launched into the air and then having the tree explode into the car like a massive sappy airbag going off. I would have asked the driver, but he was nowhere to be found.

A teenaged hockey player on his way to a game on Bell Island, he'd looked at the car, forced his way into the trunk to get his hockey equipment, and had started walking for the ferry dock, leaving the car behind.

You're not supposed to leave an accident scene, but he must have thought his explanation made sense: he told the police that his coach would have been angry if he had missed the game. It's hard to imagine he played very well.

In the end, it took two tow trucks to pry the car out of the spot where it was wedged.

TWENTY-SEVEN

So.

Not the easy equation, this. Not the kind of thing you expect to get the
chance to explain afterwards.

There was a fire. That part is simple.

It was a set fire—inside a fifty-gallon oil drum that was standing, like
an unworldly coffee table, in the middle of a living room.

The room was empty. No furniture. Afterwards, after the explosion,
there was nowhere to sit but the stairs. Watching the smoke climb backwards
down the wall.

The front door was open, framing the brilliant green outdoors. Bright
summer grass out there. Someone yelling, “Come out. Come out.”

But I was too tired to move. Too tired to lift my legs, too tired to take
even those few steps to the doorway. Watching everything unfold around
me, powerless to do anything. I suppose that's what going into shock feels
like—from the inside.

Paint was bubbling on the walls. It bubbles first, and it bubbles faster
than you think it should, and then the bubbles crust over black, and then
they split—have you ever seen that? Ever watched those bubbles rise right
before your eyes? Like blisters, but faster.

A gas fire—diesel too. A mixture of the two. It burns like the colour of
plums, the colour of overripe plums bursting out from inside their skin, orange,
yellow and blue.

I smelled the hair burning inside my nose. Snap—ablaze. It wasn't
burning—and then it was. Eyebrows. The fringe of hair that was sticking
out from under my fire hood. Around the tips of my ears.

Breathe at the wrong moment and that would have been it for me. Like
blowing out a candle, but in reverse.

Lungs burned out.

Snuffed.

The explosion burned off most of my eyebrows. Sitting on the back of the rescue truck, I watched the ashes fall away when I touched my forehead. I grabbed at the long, curved ashes as they fell, trying to figure out what they were, but they turned into smudges as soon as I touched them, like the forest-fire ashes of spruce needles. Perfect until I touched them. In its own way, it was for me the end of fighting fires, even though I would go through the paces for almost another full year.

My hand, moving across my forehead, tore away a blistered patch of skin, thin like one single ply of tissue paper, and I forgot about the eyelashes altogether when the air struck the raw skin.

There is a moment between when an explosion sweeps over you and when you feel it—a moment of disbelief. A moment of smelling a cat that got too close to a candle. A moment of “This isn't happening to me.” Or, more to the point, “This can't be happening to me.”

But by then it's far, far too late.

For a moment before the explosion, before the “whump” that you feel in your chest—before the “whump” that seems to run right through you and out the other side like the wake of a speedboat heading for the opposite shore—there is a moment of distraction, for lack of a better word. Maybe the word is disconnection. Maybe dislocation. Maybe there are better words. I wasn't really thinking about words.

I stopped thinking.

At the time when it's actually happening, there are no words, because everything is sucked up in the raw happening. It's hard for your head to make sense of it all, to catalogue all of the pieces that come shooting at you from all directions and from all senses. At the same time, you feel that there should be something obvious to say about it, because it all happens so very slowly, and so very significantly.

We had been in the house once already that day, the place full of smoke, and we had cut holes through the flat roof to let the smoke and heat out.

Fuel fires are funny things. They sometimes wander and flicker and don't smoke at all, while whatever's actually going to ignite the fuel is waiting, looking for the exact mixture, the perfect alchemy of diesel and gasoline and air. They're hard to light sometimes, because everything has to be just right—but, once started, fuel fires quickly make their own combinations, their own chemical equations, and the result is astounding in its speed and ferocity.

It was all a training exercise on a house that was going to be torn down anyway, and, as in so many fire scenes, it offered its own small windows of voyeurism. There were upstairs rooms with complicated and patterned wallpaper, varnished dark stair banisters, and rooms with lighter patches in the carpet and dents where the furniture had been. Bed here, chair there, with only your imagination to fill in the blanks. The blanks where people lived and loved and had their children climb into bed with them on cold winter mornings, the blanks where there had been laughter and loss. There were still circles where flowerpots had perched, spilling, on the window ledges, and wire coat hangers in the closets and coat hooks in a line on a board by the back door.

Once we had burned it the first time, it was hard to imagine it as a house where people had once lived, especially when the place was suddenly filled with smoke and you could hear the chainsaw snarling through the roof above you.

The second time we went into the house, everything was baking hot from the first fire. We hadn't built that part into the chemical equation. The steel barrel we put the fire in, the walls, the ceiling, the air: everything was charged with heat. With the first training run, the big barrel had burned steadily in the living room for fifteen or twenty minutes. If any of us had taken off one of our fire gloves, we could have pressed a palm against a wall and known how much of the heat was holding there.

We had filled the fire barrel again with fresh fuel, diesel and gasoline and enough brush to make a good load of heavy smoke for the trainee firefighters, and after a few minutes I was on my way back in to light it. Outside, the other firefighters were loading the truck up with hose: we were going to start afresh, right down to positioning the trucks and dragging the portable pumps down to the river to get a supply of water.

Inside the hot house, the fuel in the barrel was turning to a gas, poking around corners looking for a source of ignition. When I went back in to light the barrel with a piece of burning cardboard, it was waiting for me.

Sometimes you hear firefighters talk about a fire that way, as a person rather than a thing, as if fires have intent and purpose. Open the wrong door at a house fire without checking for heat with your hand and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If the fire's inside that room and darkened down because there's not enough air, everything in the room will flash over when you feed it the air it needs, and if you're lucky you'll just be blown backwards, head over heels down the stairs, and actually live to tell about it. Inside the little house, I wasn't blown over; instead, the fire blew right over me, heading somewhere else, leaving its mark in passing.

I saw the big flames first when they were coming out over the top of the barrel like liquid: great mounded, roiling masses of flame the colour of old bruises, boiling up over my gloves and the sleeves of my fire jacket, suddenly all around me like mist blown in quickly off a cold ocean. I didn't see the flames leap from my hand to the barrel, and even if it had been pitch-black inside the house I might not have seen it anyway. They move from here to there in an instant.

I had all my gear on, my coat and gloves and helmet. I had the air pack on my back, but the mask was hanging on the front of my jacket, rocking back and forth there on my chest. If I'd done what I was supposed to do, just put it over my face and tightened down the five straps, clicking the regulator into the facepiece, nothing else would have happened.

There is a strange wonder to flames, almost a magic. They lick silently across the fabric of your sleeve, run up your chest like a lover's fingers, and you don't feel them at first. They're like fairies, or the kind of caressing wind that makes you turn around to see if someone you didn't notice behind you has reached out to touch your face.

It was just a breathy wave as it passed over me. An exhalation, a long, gentle
hoooooo
.

The shock was something I didn't expect at all. All I remember is walking away from the barrel and the growing fire and then sitting down on the stairs to the second floor.

Outside, other firefighters had seen the windows light up when the fuel flashed over, and had heard the familiar hollow box-filled-with-cotton-wool thump of the explosion. They were shouting at me to come out of the house. I remember being both oddly startled and overwhelmingly tired.

After that first flash, the fire went dark quickly, and thick, sooty black smoke ran across the ceiling, filling the space as evenly as if it was carpet laid on the floor. It moved down the walls until it got to the door frames and then lipped underneath and rushed up the stairs behind me.

Outside, it was a brilliantly sunny day and, looking out through the rectangle of the front door, I can remember how the green grass and the bushes stood out bright against the dark inside, more like a floor-to-ceiling painting of the outdoors in a door-sized frame than the real thing.

Then the smoke started flowing out that door too. Even then I remember an incredible lassitude, as if my arms were hugely heavy, as if there were no way I could ever lever my way to my feet.

It wasn't until the other firefighters started rushing in through the door, coming up to me and grabbing my elbows, that I thought it would even be possible to move.

Like the man inside the tanker truck, I had survived intact for no clear reason that I understood. I deserved to be dead—but I wasn't.

Instead, I was in one piece.

Mostly.

Afterwards, outside, I sat alone on the back of the rescue truck, feeling the comforting, familiar rumble of its engine through my back as I leaned on the back doors and watched the rest of my crew rush to put out the fire. Every single step they took was one I had taken before, was one I could feel in my muscles as if I were doing it myself. Every call they made was one that I would have made too, standing outside and directing my firefighters. I touched my forehead gently, feeling the rising row of blisters. They didn't need me to tell them what to do.

For a few moments I could feel everything, as if my senses were overrun: the incredible brightness of the sun, the depth of the noise around me, the astounding weight of the trees and grass on my eyes.

Then, like the lead edge of a wave rolling past, all of it was gone, and as the pain really started, the whole world seemed to redden and dull, and time—time, which had been moving so slowly—suddenly leapt forward in double time, and minutes, then hours, accordioned in on themselves.

Months later, Ray Parsons would sometimes sidle up to me conspiratorially and whisper, with a lopsided grin, “You blowed up good,” and smile. He was right in more ways than one. I knew that I was extremely lucky to be alive. I had been breathing out, not in, not even thinking about it. So when the fuel in the room had flashed over, I lost all the hair on and around my face, and not a lot more.

When I got home, I hurried past my boys and Barby, anxious to get closer to a mirror than I could to the big side mirrors on the truck, anxious to see how bad the burns were and whether I should just hop back into my truck and head for the hospital. I knew they were bad, because I could feel the sparkly rawness of open flesh; I just didn't know how much of me was burned.

Barby followed me up the stairs, and when she saw my face she was furious. “When are you going to stop playing at this?” she said.

The hard part was that I knew exactly what she was saying, that I could hear all the balled-up anger and frustration in it, and knew that all of it was absolutely fair. And yet it was a betrayal at the same time—a betrayal of me—because I was a professional, because I'd spent years preparing for this, learning exactly what to do despite the strangeness of the circumstances, because I had spent years training for facial burns and the possibility of tracheal burns and the need for quick hospital intervention. For shock. For crisis.