Burning Down the House. Russell Wangersky

use. Once the roof of the car was off, there would be as many as five firefighters inside the destroyed vehicle, and the chief decided not to take any chances.

      “She only just got it,” the woman said to me.

      “Got what?” I said, drawn back all at once from the sounds outside. “The car. Carla only just got the car. It’s used, but she just bought it.”

      From the river, down in the mud and the water and the big circular puddles of spotlight, there was suddenly screaming again.

      Loud.

      “Is she all right? Is she going to be all right?”

      I tried to judge from the screaming, a mug’s game because everyone is so different, tried to guess whether she had snapped out of the shock and was just frightened or actually in a lot of pain. I heard the compressor engage and knew the hydraulics were working, and that the cutters were taking their first clean bite through the car. But I couldn’t find a way to push out any words to answer her questions. My head was trying to find its way onto solid ground, and I was slipping in my own deep mud. I wanted her to refine the question, to ask her, “What’s ‘all right’? Alive? Walking? Spine-injured? Rehab?”

      Then the woman I was supposed to be keeping calm tried to get out of the rescue. When she pulled the handle open and started to push on the door, I reached across and grabbed her by the wrist, encircling her small arm as gently as I could, the tips of my thumb and index finger barely touching.

      That was all it took. I didn’t have to pull or really even hold her arm, just gently wrap my fingers around it, and she stopped moving as suddenly as if I had bound her in place, like a magic lasso. Like all she needed was the tiniest reason to stop, because while she felt drawn to the noise outside, really she didn’t want to see anything at all. As we sat there, frozen like that, I watched the emergency lights of first the ambulance, and then the police, and finally the wrecker, dance down the hill behind us in the big wing mirrors of the rescue, and neither of us spoke again.

      Her friend Carla, it turned out, had back injuries low down, and savagely torn muscles, the kind of constant pain that can wind up changing your life so that you can’t even remember what it was like when you used to wake up without hurting. Once they had her free, she screamed more when they put her on the backboard and then into the mesh Stokes basket, and even though they carried her up as evenly and steadily as they could, the firefighters kept slipping left and right in the mud, and she screamed with every small jolt all the way up the bank to the side of the road.

      I let go of Carla’s friend so that the police could talk to her in the back of their own car. They had come up to the window and knocked, and after I let her go I rode back to Wolfville on the same long bench seat where the chief had placed me, hemmed in on both sides by tired, dirty firefighters who smelled like wet brass and clamshells. Big firefighters who actually did something, who didn’t get sent just to sit in the rescue.

      Even though we hosed the gear down as soon as we got back to the station, the fine red and black silt of the mud had worked its way into the fabric of the other firefighters’ bunker pants, and they had that shadow—a carry-over of past circumstances, a little black cloud, a badge, a deep-seated messaging smudge—until we spent a Monday night training with firefighting foam, both the fluffy detergent foam and the heavier protein foam that smelled for all the world like hotdogs. After that, all our gear was clean for a while, as if our histories had been magically overwritten.

      By then I knew I was learning a secret alphabet, a different kind of code, a type of shorthand that passed for identification between firefighters, so you’d designate things as “the woman in the reservoir,” “the burning pig” or “the asphalt-truck crash.” It was a remarkably private language, something inside the firefighting fraternity and, most times, inside the particular department itself.

      The geography of firefighting is built on experience, and it’s built by every call. Windsor, I’d learn, was the town where the fire department had been called out to a propane explosion and found a house where all the sills were broken off, and two pies that had been cooling on a kitchen table had glued themselves to the ceiling, driven straight upwards by the force of the explosion. You tend to lay things out in your own distinct memory map; it’s a pattern of dots where things have happened, sometimes insignificant things— like the house I’ve always called the bacon-fire house because, every time the family cooked bacon, their smoke alarm went off and we would get sent to check it out. I’ve built my own mental pocket guide to two very different communities, including indelible marks that indicate where things went wrong—or, worse, the inevitables I tried to change and couldn’t. It’s all mine, my private complication— no two firefighters have been on the exact same pattern of calls, have been in the same places or have the same memories.

      Bit by bit, you write your own shorthand.

      The man who came from the propane company to teach us about how stable the gas could actually be had a trick at the end of the lecture, where he’d flick a lit cigarette, end over end—everyone smoked in the fire hall then—into a glass he’d carefully filled to the top with propane. Falling into the glass, the cigarette was supposed to go out, proving that propane will only ignite when it’s perfectly mixed with air—and the trick worked, every time.

      Until there, in front of the fire department blackboard, when we were treated to a slapping great sooty explosion, a fireball that reached to the ceiling tiles and a drinking glass that blew apart in bits.

      “That’s never happened before,” the propane safety officer declared, shaken.

      “It’ll never happen again,” the chief said, “because that’s the last time you’ll do it here.”

      The rest of the department climbed up off the floor and stood up the grey-enamelled metal folding chairs that had toppled over as we had all thrown ourselves down.

SIX

      Going to an autumn fire in White Rock, and the pumper was racing along the narrow Nova Scotian back roads. I watched the high grass whip by on the shoulder without knowing what was in front of the truck, without ever knowing what was coming. Hanging on tight, hearing the air brakes muscle on, feeling the truck tilt down in the front end and my shoulder press into the back of the truck, the hose nozzles dangling down and banging hard against the metal plate.

      The house in White Rock was burning fast; I could tell that from the pillar of dirty yellow-black smoke I could see when the truck was at the crossroads a mile or so away. A big thumb-smudge of smoke, the kind of smoke that made one of my hands check the front of my fire coat, that made me mentally walk through the steps of putting on breathing apparatus and pulling hose. In my head, my left arm was already through the loops that hung from the attack line and my body was bending away at an angle with that first tug. I was pulling those loops in my imagination long before the truck stopped, spilling the flat yellow coils across the grass, waiting for the pump operator to pull the lever and fill the line with water, snapping the flat hose round and popping the sharp kinks into smooth curves.