Vertical Burn (6 page)

12. UNTIL THEY PRY MY COLD FINGERS OFF THIS DESK

“Six months ago when they diagnosed it,” Finney said, “they told him aggressive treatment might give him a year at the outside, but he opted out of that. He doesn’t want to live the twilight of his life driving back and forth from the hospital. Mostly, he’s playing golf. When he has the strength.”

It was bad enough that his father was dying, worse that he was dying of cancer, an occupational hazard among firefighters, and it prompted Finney to wonder what toxins had banked up in his own system during the nearly two decades he’d been a firefighter. He knew that because of the twenty- to thirty-year gestation period of many cancers, firefighters frequently retired just in time to discover they had six months to live.

“He was a stubborn old fart,” said Reese, grinning.

“Still is.”

Finney resisted the temptation to toy with the set of lieutenant’s bars in his pocket, a gift from his father, who couldn’t get enough of the fact that his younger son, with whom he rarely saw eye-to-eye, was finally going to be an officer. If his father didn’t live long enough to see him make captain, at least he would see Finney wearing his own battle-tested lieutenant’s bars. Finney’s older brother, Tony, the apple of his father’s eye, made lieutenant twelve years ago and captain shortly thereafter, all according to the old man’s schedule. The fact that Tony then went into a long tailspin precipitated by a gambling habit and two volatile divorces from the same woman somehow evaded their father’s radar, a situation Finney found amusingly ironic. Finney’s father wanted only one thing for his sons. He had climbed through the ranks from firefighter to lieutenant, from captain to battalion chief, and he wanted desperately to see both his sons do the same.

“Did you know your old man was my first batt chief?” Reese asked. “Out at Eighteen’s?”

“I guess I’d forgotten.” Reese couldn’t have looked too impressive just out of drill school. Finney remembered how his strength used to fade toward the end of the day as they were picking up wet hose to hang in the tower at 14’s, how he couldn’t hide his fear in the smoke room. As a recruit Finney quickly learned which of his fellow trainees he could count on, and Reese had never been one of them. Once in the company, Reese spent thousands of hours studying for promotionals. Despite all the studying, his first test results were mediocre—forty-eighth on a lieutenant’s list from which fifty-four firefighters were promoted. Three years later he scored slightly higher on the captain’s test, but only enough to get the last captain’s spot. If he hadn’t been one-sixteenth American Indian, he might not have been promoted at all. Later he was the last battalion chief to be made from that list. Even in drill school Reese had made each cut by a whisker, yet his history of scraping by was transformed in a single stroke by Leary Way, which propelled him directly into the department chief’s office.

“Your father. My first day in the company he told us he was going to drill the engine. Most of those guys had been in fifteen, twenty years, and they were worried. I took my cues from them. Your old man was a terror. He finally shows up eating a Wendy’s burger. He runs us through five hose evolutions on the back ramp. I thought we were going to suck the main dry. Afterward we’re sopping wet and exhausted and shivering, and he comes over to me and says, ‘You’re pumping into the standpipe to the tenth floor of a high-rise. Upstairs you’ve got two hundred feet of inch-and-a-half hose line with a Wooster nozzle. Two one-hundred-foot two-and-a-half-inch lines into the standpipe from the engine. What’s your pump pressure?’ That was his question to me, and that’s my question to you now.”

“We haven’t carried inch-and-a-half hose for years.”

“What if I said your promotion depended on the answer?”

What an asshole, Finney thought. Well, he wasn’t above jumping through a few hoops if that’s what it took to get a promotion. Just so he didn’t have to bend over and drop his pants. Although it was starting to look like maybe the Lazenby brothers hadn’t been joking about that. “A hundred pounds of pressure for the nozzle, twenty-five for each section of inch-and-a-half, forty-five for the nine stories above grade, and twenty-five for the standpipe. Nothing for the parallel two-and-a-halfs until you’re flowing more than two hundred gallons a minute. You’re pumping at two-twenty.”

“Try doing that out in the rain after you’ve been drilling for three hours.”

“Put me out in the rain and drill me for three hours.” Finney smiled.

Reese furrowed his brow. “You think the way your old man treated me was funny?”

“Not at all.” Finney had no idea where this was leading. If his father had been hard on Reese, he’d been hard on Finney, too. And on his brother. They’d suffered his wrath for a good many more years than Charlie Reese. Inside and outside the department Gil Finney had been a son of a bitch, and because of that, John had always kept his own counsel regarding his father, as he would now. Gil Finney had come into the fire department under a regime headed by flint-eyed men who’d fought in World War II and Korea, unforgiving men, a gruff bunch who schooled him until he was hard, too, the part of him that wasn’t steel to begin with. People either loved him or hated him, and on both sides of the fence they were intimidated by him.

Reese leaned against his desk and clasped his hands together. “Every time I ran into your old man, he made me look like a fool. I swore I was going to get even.”

“You’re going to outlive him, if that’s any consolation.” Finney thought it was ironic that Reese groused about Chief Finney, because as feared as his father had been in certain quarters, there were men who would have given their lives for him. On the flip side of the coin, there weren’t too many people who would spit the toothpick out of their mouths for Reese. Finney knew it had a lot to do with the indifference he displayed, as if he didn’t feel anything for the people working under him and wanted them to know it. In fact, it seemed to Finney that Reese was and always had been proud of how much he was disliked.

Reese gave him a long, withering look. “He used to go home and laugh about me, didn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t know. I barely spoke to him until after Leary Way.”

“Leary Way? Goddamn. I almost forgot about that. You’re not still bothering people over that fire, are you?”

Obviously it was poor interview strategy to bring up the night he’d lost his partner, and Finney felt like kicking himself for it. Still, the words were out of his mouth, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do. “I’m looking into it.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

“Tell you what,” said Reese, smugly. “Here’s your million-dollar question. Get this right and you’ve got the job. You’re deep inside a fire building. A wall collapses on your partner. You can’t dig him out. You have one radio between the two of you, but neither of you knows exactly where you are, so you can’t tell anybody how to get there. What do you do?”

“Charlie, is this a joke?”

“I think from now on you’d better call me
chief
.”

Finney felt a rush of heat in his face. Impossible and wrong as it seemed, he knew now that despite having the top score on the list, he wasn’t going to get promoted. Thirty-five lieutenants were going to come off that list, but he wouldn’t be one of them. Maybe Reese wanted an answer to his question. Maybe he didn’t. Finney knew giving him one wouldn’t change his mind.

For a few moments, Reese stared morosely at the wall. It wasn’t a joke, but he didn’t require an answer either. “I’m glad you came up. I needed a breather. You know, this job is like riding a bicycle around the inside of a tornado. Phone calls. Messages. Meetings. The mayor’s office. Carla and I are having dinner with Jon Stevenson tonight. The state senator?”

“I know who Stevenson is.”

“We’re going to see if we can’t get a statewide task force on arson fires moving along in the right direction.” Clasping his hands behind his back, Reese walked to the window, a world-weary act Finney had seen before, an affectation of thoughtfulness and calm, a commander at the helm of his ship. As a young officer, Reese had been mocked for it, mimics duplicating it within days of each new assignment, the wake of his career strewn with uniformed clowns who could ape him perfectly. Finney had always thought the mockery was a little sophomoric, akin to making fun of the teacher when his back was turned, but now he could picture himself mimicking Reese’s self-important pose.

“Am I going to get this job?” Finney asked.

Without turning around, Reese peered at Finney over his shoulder. “You know how long I’m going to be chief?”

“Am I going to get the job?”

“Until they pry my cold fingers off that desk. Meanwhile I’m going to build an officer corps the likes of which this department’s never seen. John, I want you to hear this from me. I figure I owe you that much. I’m not going to promote you.”

Even though he’d seen it coming, Finney felt as if he’d been hit in the chest. Surely this little pissant who could barely cut the mustard in drill school, who’d been promoted at the tail end of each list, who’d been despised by each of his crews, wasn’t going to sink Finney’s career over one fire? Or because of his father.

He tried to concentrate, vaguely aware that Reese was talking, though the words came to his ears as if through water.

“. . . and it wasn’t until I got a few years under my belt and gained some experience that I was able to appreciate what a power-mad, incompetent jackass your old man really was. . . . After what happened I know a lot of people still believe you’re a good firefighter, but for the time being I think, rather than giving orders, you should learn how to take them. You study for the next test two years from now. Meanwhile I’m going to keep you at Twenty-six’s. That should help settle you down.”

“I deserve this promotion and you know it.”

Reese walked over to the office door and dropped his hand onto the knob. “I can’t promote a man who would abandon his partner and then sabotage the efforts of the rescue team.”

“Abandon? What the hell are you talking about? I went for help. And just how did I sabotage the rescue team? I did everything but take your hand and lead you down that corridor. In fact, I offered to do just that.”

“You were in a blind panic,” Reese said quietly. “I almost lost my life because of you.”

Finney stared into Reese’s unwavering dark eyes. He’d never seen a man more sure of himself.

“You’re making a mistake,” Finney said. “I’m a good firefighter and I’d be a good officer.”

“There are two of us in this room, John. One of us has a citation on the wall. The other has a dead partner. Think about it.”

13. SICK CHICKENS WITH MATCHES

The rig was out when Finney got back to Station 26, and for a few crazy minutes he considered emptying his locker and leaving his resignation scrawled on a roll of toilet paper the way one contemptuous old-timer had done years before. There were several actions he could take. He still had a vague hankering to go back to school, get a degree, and teach high school history. He’d worked for a commercial painting outfit and he’d always liked the smell of paint and the routine of good honest labor every day. The fire department wasn’t the air in his lungs or the blood in his veins. Then again, nothing would destroy his father quicker than to see him quit. And as he thought about it, he realized maybe the fire department
was
the air in his lungs and the blood in his veins. Maybe it was those things and more.

As he stood there thinking, Finney became aware of a woman rapping on the glass door to the station, her face less than a foot from his. Apparently she’d been in front of him for some time. It was Annie, one of their regulars. From dawn to dusk Annie roamed the streets of South Park, the neighborhood Station 26 protected, pulling a two-wheeled wire shopping cart behind her, obsessed with making right-angle turns, which meant she had surely been in his direct line of vision for the last thirty feet of her jaunt. Annie was a small woman in her early sixties who wore old-fashioned hiking boots, white knee socks, and, as always, a denim skirt and a lightweight raincoat.

As a courtesy, the Seattle Fire Department tested blood pressures for citizens during business hours; every station had their regulars, and Annie was one of 26’s. He knelt beside her, wrapped the blood pressure cuff around her arm, and put the stethoscope to his ears. It was, as always, 120 over 60, perfectly normal.

As she put her raincoat back on, she said, “You going to be here for the war?”

“What war?”

She removed a
Wall Street Journal
from her cart and showed him an article on the front page announcing an agreement between two Mideast powers to lower the price of oil. “Don’t you see it? They’re lowering the crude prices to lull us into complacency. These men have nuclear weapons. They say they don’t, but they do. We’re all standing in a pool of gasoline, and now these sick chickens have matches. What I need to know is whether you’re here at night.”

“Somebody’s always here, Annie. We work twenty-four-hour shifts.”

“You. I’m talking about
you
.”

“I won’t be here every minute. But somebody will.”

“I want you here. I’m scared.”

Finney patted Annie’s shoulder. He knew the worlds of the mentally ill and the mentally broken weren’t far apart, and even though he had survived those hellish weeks after Leary Way, they were as vivid to him now as if they’d happened yesterday. He’d tiptoed along the abyss, and there were a few hours scattered over several of the worst days when he’d come close to losing his mind. He identified with Annie in a way no one else in the station could.

“Don’t worry. Everything’s going to work out fine no matter who’s here. You have a good day, Annie.”

“Bet’cher ass, sweetie.”

14. THE DOOTER IN THE HELMET

After they’d done the dinner dishes, Finney and Jerry Monahan collapsed in the station recliners, Monahan channel-surfing with the remote control, Finney unable to motivate himself for even the simplest task. The whole battalion knew Finney had lost the promotion, the topic picked over by the twin vultures of gossip and Monday-morning quarterbacking; they were bound to connect it to his performance at Leary Way. It ate at him to know that everybody was talking about him again.

“I didn’t want to tell you before you went down there,” Monahan said, “but I knew you weren’t going to get the job.”

“What? How did you know that?”

“Somebody who works down there told me. I’d rather not say who.”

“Jesus. Why didn’t you warn me?”

“Are you kidding? Who wants to tell a guy a thing like that?” Monahan let his belt out a couple of notches. They’d made fajitas, the four of them—Finney, Sadler, Monahan, and Iverson, who was manning the air rig, Air 26—and except for Finney, who’d lost his appetite, they’d eaten too much. Iverson was hiding out on the other side of the station with a calculator and a stack of personal bills. Sadler was in his office on the phone.

Monahan ballooned his belly out, lifted his leg, and farted. He wouldn’t swear out loud, but he would fart in a cathedral. “Geez-Louise, why do I eat so much?”

“Same reason you break wind in public,” Finney said, still smarting over the fact that Monahan had known in advance about his not getting the promotion. “Lack of character.”

Passing off the insult, Monahan chuckled as if it were a joke and turned his head at the sound of knocking at the back door. Finney crossed the room and opened the door. It was his brother, Tony.

“Just thought I’d come by and see how you were.”

“You heard?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Monahan rose and scratched the back of his head. “I better go see if I got November seventh off. I’ve been asking about it all day.”

“Why do you need the seventh off?” Finney asked.

“My wedding anniversary,” Monahan said, nervously. “I forgot last year. You can bet your booties there was heck to pay. Thirty-two years. I get anything wrong this time, the little woman’ll really pin my ears back.” Monahan stepped around the corner into the corridor and knocked on Lieutenant Sadler’s door.

“Some place we can talk?” Tony asked, giving Monahan a sour look as he left the room.

They walked out into the cold apparatus bay behind Engine 26 and stood facing each other on the concrete floor.

Taking after their mother’s side of the family, John was blue-eyed, easygoing, and genial. Tony resembled their father, penetrating dark eyes, blond hair. A captain at Station 17, Tony was three years older and four inches shorter than Finney. Tony and their father were the hardnoses in the clan, both calculating and intense, and each with a mean streak, though recently they’d both worked at taming it—Tony, perhaps because of the bad marriages; their father, because of the cancer.

“He’s not trying to put this off on Leary Way, is he?” Tony asked.

“Maybe a little.”

“You know, when he was a captain at Thirty-one’s, somebody dumped a dooter in his helmet. You ever hear that story? You got to really hate somebody to drop a hot turd in his helmet.”

“Thanks, Tony. Thanks for coming by.”

“You should have called the minute it happened. You got anybody else to talk to? How about Laura?”

Finney had been divorced from Laura almost six years. “Not likely.”

“Jesus, you’re right. I know how pissed Doris gets at me when we’re not married. God, I was at Seventeen’s to pick up my check, and they were saying you and Reese almost came to blows. Until now everybody’s pretty much been waiting to figure out his style. But this goes against all tradition. You were top dog on the list. By rights you should have snagged that first job. Nobody’s ever been head man on the list and not gotten a job. Now everybody’s going to ask why the hell they should even take the test.”

“I didn’t screw up at Leary Way.” Finney hadn’t meant to say the words; they’d just come out.

“I know that, John. We all know that.”

“You might. Plenty of others don’t. And I didn’t almost come to blows with him.” Finney sat next to Tony on the cold steel of Engine 26’s diamond-plate tailboard, looking out at the darkness through the windows in the roll-up rear door of the apparatus bay. He and Tony had never been close, and Finney wished it hadn’t taken their father’s illness to unite them.

For some minutes neither spoke. Then Tony opened his billfold and handed Finney fifty dollars. “Two weeks ago. Remember?”

It was a rare month when Tony didn’t put the touch on him. In the past it had been the horses, but these days he spent his free time at the Indian casinos, a predilection that was beginning to rock his third marriage the same way the horses had rocked the two marriages to Doris. So far his new wife, Annette, was more forgiving than Doris, but Finney could see the handwriting on the wall.

“Thanks for dropping by, Tony.”

“The gossip about Leary Way is bound to speed up after this. Not too many people like Reese, but he’s the man in the catbird seat. Watch your backside, too. Balitnikoff’s been telling everyone the reason you and Cordifis were paired up at fires was because Bill was baby-sitting you.”

“You kidding?”

“I know; I know. Anybody ever worked with you two knows it was the other way around. But a rumor is like busting a feather pillow in a windstorm. You never get all the feathers back. No point in trying.”

“Rumors are the least of my worries.”

“I’m glad you’re taking it so calmly.”

But he wasn’t taking it calmly. Balitnikoff. Besides having worked at Station 10 for the past three years, Marion Balitnikoff had been in and out of Finney’s life since he’d known Bill Cordifis. Finney had long ago been conscripted into the weekly Cordifis clan get-togethers, and frequently this meant spending time with Bill’s department pals, Marion Balitnikoff among them. Finney and Balitnikoff had crossed swords more than once. Uneasy about the way he ogled Heather, Cordifis’s youngest daughter, Finney had mentioned it to her father, who, either unwilling or incapable of thinking ill of his friends, dismissed Finney’s concerns out of hand. Balitnikoff was a family friend, and that was that. To make matters worse, Cordifis, for some reason, told Balitnikoff what Finney had said. Balitnikoff had never forgiven him.

Tony picked a piece of lint off his younger brother’s collar. “God, I was worried for you that night. We pulled in just as the roof on the west side caved in and fired up the sky. I thought you were going to die. They must have been working on you, oh, fifteen minutes, had all your clothes except your jockeys stripped off and were putting ringers into you, when one of the medics decided to get a core temperature. A hundred and six. The doctors told me hallucinations start at a hundred and five. Can you imagine how hot you must have been twenty minutes earlier when you were inside?”

To Finney’s way of thinking, the modern fire service had gone overboard in mandating protective equipment. During his first years on the job full bunkers had been optional. He’d worn a heavy bunking coat, a helmet, gloves, cotton—and later Nomex—pants, along with steel-toed work boots. Only at night or at the more hazardous fires would he climb into knee-high rubber bunking boots and the heavy bunking pants that came with them. In the old days their ears, necks, and skin around their facepieces were exposed. People who’d worked with that system liked it because, despite occasional steam burns, it gave them a valuable temperature gauge.

Now, mummified in a variety of heavy, fire-resistant garments, they often went so far into fire buildings they couldn’t get out safely. There was no way to tell how hot it was until it was too late.

And though the manufacturers touted the latest materials in heat transference properties, the fact was that even the best-conditioned firefighters sweated heavily while working in the multilayered bunking coats and trousers. The body produced sweat in order to cool, yet in bunkers there was no cooling effect. To Finney, compared to the old days, it seemed as if fires were being fought in slow motion. Teams were sent to rehab to drink and rest after depleting a single half-hour air bottle.

Fire departments across the country were fighting forty percent fewer fires but losing more people than ever. Firefighters were dropping from heart attacks and heatstroke and from getting trapped deep inside burning buildings, while the industry adjusted its blinders and tried to figure out why. Finney and plenty of others knew why. They were going into these buildings carrying the earth and sky on their backs like Atlas.

“John. I’m really sorry about what happened today.”

“Thanks, Tony.”

“Jesus! How are you going to tell Dad? This’ll kill him.”

“I’ll figure out something.”

Finney let Tony out the rear door of the apparatus bay, his brother’s final comment ringing in his ears. Despite their recent closeness, it was just like Tony to point out that this was going to hurt their father—kill him, in fact. It was also like him to make sure it was the last thing he said, a dig that appeared accidental yet probably wasn’t, the sort of double-edged comment Tony had honed to perfection over the years.