Through the Fire Page 8

  “Right. Thanks.” So much for my plan.

  Butcher walked up to Kat. “Mechanic says the air line’s all fixed.”

  She looked up. “So we’re back in service?”

  Butcher nodded. “Yep.”

  Just beyond him, on the stainless steel counter, lay a white business envelope with my first and last names written in elaborate cursive. There was no way a man had penned that. I lifted the envelope and looked around. Everyone was caught up in activities.

  I took a seat at the table by the door. The corner ensured my correspondence remained private. I tore open the seam and unfolded a white sheet of paper.

  Aidan,

  There is so much more to say than what has been said. You were right about us meeting. I just thought that maybe you’ d have recalled it more clearly.

  It’s hard to explain, but I know a lot more about you than you realize. I know you loved your dad. And I can tell that inside, though you hide it well, you are fighting something.

  I just reread what I wrote. You probably think I’m some kind of stalker. That’s exactly the impression I was hoping to avoid. But here’s the thing. I was still around when your father died. And I know that the cause of that fire remains unsolved. I can only imagine how that lack of closure must affect you.

  I think I can help.

  If you are interested, meet me at the lab tomorrow afternoon.Earlier is better.

  Best regards,

  Julianne

  “Code seven,” Sortish paged over the loud speaker. “Code seven.”

  Time to eat.

  I folded the letter into my pocket. Guys filtered in, filled their plates with Waits’s spaghetti, and sat down to eat.

  There was a predictable increase in years on the job as they sat away from the windows and toward the pole hole. Captain Sower and Waits sat opposite of each other on the end nearest the pole, Lowell was next over and opposite Butcher, and so on. I sat beside Timothy Clark in the middle. Naturally, the phone was on the window end and answering it was Sortish’s job.

  I twirled spaghetti on my fork, finding myself half listening to conversations, half lost in a mosaic of thoughts. Somewhere, in the world of the kitchen table, which lay for me just beyond a veil, Lowell wound into one of his nightly monologues, standing up when he got real excited telling the story.

  Segments and phrases met my ears like clips of music when turning the radio dial.

  “White Wolf Syndrome.”

  “That’s passé. McCormick’s is the cheap stuff now.”

  I had the strange sensation of not really being there, like a passive observer witnessing everything on a television screen. Seated, but unseen. Present but not participating. I took a piece of garlic bread from a bowl. It looked like bread in someone else’s hand.

  The table broke into an uproar. I looked up and smiled, no idea what the joke was.

  Lowell was out of his seat saying, “So the guy’s frantic, pointing and yelling, ‘Chicken breath! Chicken breath!’ and Butcher’s just standing there nodding and thinking we need PD or something when Peyton walks over to the woman and realizes she’s choking.”

  Hands slapped the table and laughter echoed through the kitchen.

  Lowell kept on, “And Butcher’s still staring at his clipboard with this deer in the headlights look, so I put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘She can’t breathe, Mark. She can’t breathe.’ And just as it dawns on him, I kid you not, Peyton’s doing the Heimlich and the lady hocks this fat piece of hot dog right onto the clipboard. Right on it.”

  Waits laughed so hard he started choking. Lowell faked like he was doing abdominal thrusts on him, yelling, “Chicken breath! Chicken breath!”

  He pointed at Kat. “You know, I used to think Katrina was a good operator, but the more I think about it . . . chicken drive!” “Yeah, and chicken cook, neither!”

  “Yeah, and chicken clean!”

  Kat shook her head. “You boys better check your boots before stepping into them tonight—that’s all I got to say.”

  Sower stood and reached for Waits’s empty plate. “You all done with that?”

  Waits shooed him off. “Get your hands away from there, Benjamin.”

  Sortish rose, making sure to beat everyone to the sink. I filed out behind Timothy Clark and grabbed a towel to help.

  The station, dinner, the guys, it all seemed the same. That was what bothered me most—everyone carried on as though nothing was off. I’d rather have them all furious with me, or even giving me a ration like they did Butcher. But the fact that my faltering was being ignored felt the worst of all. My place at the table now felt like a formality for years served. The respect I valued and desired and struggled for more than anything else was slipping through my grasp like sandstone separating.

  CHAPTER

  18

  Tones.

  I spit toothpaste into the sink and glanced at my watch. Eleven thirty p.m.

  “Engine One to a medical emergency, cardiac arrest . . .”

  I slid the pole. White light . . . wind . . . floor. The night coolness darted in through the app-bay door, wrapping around my knees as I stepped into my turnout drops. We took off down Second Street, the spinning overheads casting colors over the building fronts. A thin layer of autumn frost lay like linen over the parked cars. The sidewalks were dotted with periodic pedestrians, the brash ballast light of convenience stores spilling out into the vacuum of the city. I put on my fluid-barrier glasses and held a pair of latex gloves.

  We arrived first on scene outside a single-story brick home. Lowell grabbed the defibrillator and I followed with the other bags. A gray-haired man met us at the door. He stood hunched over, holding a cordless phone.

  His lips quivered and he pointed down a narrow hallway. “Back bedroom.”

  I held the first-out in front of me to keep from knocking down photo frames. A single lamp diffused light over a compact rear room. In the bed, an emaciated woman lost inside an ivory nightgown lay on her back, gaping at the ceiling.

  “Let’s get her on the floor,” Lowell said.

  I set down the bags and placed my hands under her legs.

  Lowell took the arms. “One-two-three.”

  We lifted. Her body remained rigid, straight like a plank.

  Lowell’s eyebrows angled. “Let’s put her ba—”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  We placed her back on the bed. Lowell lifted her arm and her whole body moved. Livid purple painted the back of her neck and shoulders. Her eyes were fixed upward, gelled over and dilated.

  “I’ll let Butcher know,” Lowell said.

  I thought of the girl from the trailer park. Having lived so little, on the opposite spectrum of life. Her flaccid, dusky arms.

  I closed the woman’s eyelids with my fingertips. I didn’t drape the sheet over her head because it always seemed like burying someone when that was done. I didn’t think it right that she should be buried in the bed that she slept in.

  I heard weeping from the living room.

  Lowell returned. “Fifty-five years.”

  I picked up the first-out bag. “She looks older than that.”

  “They were married fifty-five years.”

  I nodded and stared at her.

  “The ambulance is here to wait for the coroner.”

  I walked back with him through the living room. Long shadows cast over thirty-year-old furnishings. The husband sat in a russet brown leather chair.

  Butcher knelt beside him and put a hand on his shoulder. The man’s sobs sank to laments. An RPD officer stood at the door. The air hung still, the home hollow.

  Only one person lived there now.

  One living, breathing man, and one shell of a woman he had loved for half a century.

  All was quiet back in the rig.

  Until Lowell spoke up, of course. “Light as a feather . . . stiff as a board. Light as a feather . . . stiff as a board.”

  Katrina threw a box of medical gloves back at him.
“Would you shut up? I can’t believe you.”

  Butcher stayed silent, staring out the windshield.

  Lowell wiggled his fingers in front of him, pointing at Kat in the passing strands of streetlights. “Light as a feather . . . stiff as a board.”

  She shook her head.

  Back at the station, the dorms hummed with the sounds of snoring. I lay in my bed, staring at the red digital numbers 12:01 glowing from the walnut-laminated clock in the corner of my cubicle. Three steps from my bed, a curtain hung from a rod balanced above two sets of metal lockers. Some folks had bigger walk-in closets.

  I closed my eyes, trying to purge the pestering replay of the day’s events from my mind. Wavy images of my father formed in a watery reflection.

  His grin. The way he clapped his hands when he was excited about something. A two-story brick warehouse took shape behind him, framed by an empty blue sky. A light breeze moved across shady porch steps.

  I knew this place. The Reno Fire Museum.

  I knew this day.

  He spoke with animation, describing at length the intricacies of gilded design on the doors of the restored American La France aerial. Bringing that ninety-year-old truck from its rusty, overgrown farm-lot condition to its state of cherry preservation had been a passion to which he’d dedicated a fair portion of his own sweat and dollars.

  He had picked me up after shift in his ’72 Dodge Dart, itself a labor of love. Folks had asked about it so often while I was growing up, I had memorized his standard response. “She’s got a three-forty with a six-pack Holly carb, seven-twenty-seven tranny and positraction rear end.” After which the usual response was a whistle and a nodding of the head. As a kid, I had no idea what they were talking about, but I knew that car was no simple grocery getter.

  And there I was, all of twenty-two years old, still riding shotgun on Sixth Street with the windows down, the exhaust muffler grumbling, the whole car seeming discontent with no one to race.

  He talked about how there were only a few guys in the whole country—no, the whole world—who could replicate the intricate designs on an antique fire truck like the ’17 La France. How fortunate the restoration team was to find and hook up with this guy from Ohio, and how I just had to see what had been done with it. It was the final touch. It was finished and show ready.

  They’d brought it in the back doors of the museum the day before, and he wanted me to be one of the first to see it on display, under can lights and behind thick scarlet ropes with shiny brass pedestals.

  We walked through the front doors into the black-and-white checkered-tile entryway. Artifacts and apparatus from the department’s history filled the broad footprint of the first floor. About midway down, in the center of the room, stood a wide red-carpeted staircase that led to an upstairs showroom. And just to the right of that, spanning fifty feet from nose to tiller, sat the hard-wrought work of firefighting art.

  “There she is, A-O.”

  Replete with wood-spoked wheels with hard rubber lining, a short visible stretch from the pioneer wagons that carried families to Reno in generations past. Brass rails and bells and buttoned black leather seats. And the ladder! A hundred feet in four sections, sanded and stained, glowing like new, all bedded beside pristine iron gear wheels, pulleys, and hand cranks.

  I whistled. “How’d you get her in here?” Apart from the front doors, the only way into the building was through a raised loading dock.

  He grinned, proud. “We had to build a ramp that stretched from the tow bed.” Putting a hand behind his neck, he admired the truck in its new home. “That’s what she looked like, Aidan, when they ran with her almost ninety years ago. Responding down these same streets. Over the same river. Bells clanging and guys hanging off the sides. Can you imagine?”

  Tones.

  I sat straight up in bed.

  “Engine One to a medical emergency. Subject down, unknown problem . . .”

  I walked bleary-eyed to the pole.

  No one spoke as we drove down Virginia. Kat pulled alongside an unshaven man passed out underneath the glowing Reno Arch.

  Lowell nodded at me. “How come you don’t ever see that on the postcards?”

  The man woke with a sternal rub, and with almost admirable ability, stood, brushed himself off, and walked heavy-legged north on the sidewalk.

  Kat shrugged. “At least he’s headed to District Four.”

  We got back in station at 2:05. Fatigue filled my muscles. I climbed back into bed, letting my head sink into the pillow. The carousel of rising and sinking stresses again spun down with waning inertia. Before I was even aware, sleep fell upon me.

  Tones.

  Blood rushed through my chest.

  “Engine One . . .”

  I grunted and rose, slipping on my tennis shoes for the pole.

  We exited the barn, responding to another medical.

  This patient was sleeping by the side of a building in a vacant lot off Sixth Street. He could stand and somewhat walk, so the police took him in their wagon to the “drunk tank” at the county jail.

  We pulled back into the station as Rescue One rolled out for a call. I climbed back into bed, sleep hitting hard and fast.

  Tones.

  Another medical. Another drunk. The ambulance beat us there.

  A four-fingered wave from them was all Butcher needed to clear us to return back to the station. Code four: They could handle it.

  I fought to keep my eyes open on the short ride back, the potholes in Evans Avenue keeping me awake. At 2:50 I trudged to my cubicle and sat on the bed.

  Tones.

  Pole. Boots. Headset. Another medical. Difficulty breathing in a casino hotel room. Lowell gave a nebulizer treatment to alleviate a woman’s wheezing. I took vital signs. He did the talking. We transferred care to the medics and got back at 3:15.

  Back upstairs. Back to my cube. I stood at the entryway and stared at the bed. Peyton’s somnolent sawmill was in full production next door.

  Truckies.

  I slid under my warm covers. A current of colored lines washed over me. Images of people moved like old film actors speaking in sepia silence. A deep breath expanded my lungs. My conscious mind relented, and a nebula overtook me, tugging me, drawing me into its depths.

  Tones.

  My eyelids flashed open.

  “Battalion One . . .”

  CHAPTER

  19

  B utcher keyed the mic. “Reno, Engine One en route to the fire on East Taylor.”

  “Ten-four, Engine One.”

  Kat swung onto Second, laying on the accelerator.

  Lowell stepped wide with the motion, swinging his coat on. “Whoa, you’re not in a bad mood tonight, are you, Kat?”

  She couldn’t hear him with her headset on. He pulled his on and I followed.

  “What are you yappin’ about back there?” she said.

  Lowell positioned the mic by his mouth. “I said, ‘You’re not in a bad mood, are you?’ ”

  Butcher opened the map book. “This’ll be one block east of Wells Avenue.”

  “Got it.” Kat varied the siren tone as we approached an intersection. “Why do you think I’m in a bad mood, Lowell?”

  He strapped on his air pack. “No. I didn’t say I think you’re in a bad mood. I was just wondering if you were in a bad mood.”

  “Why were you wondering that, though?”

  “Clear right,” Butcher said as we slowed for a stop sign. “It’s a small apartment complex. There’s a hydrant on . . . the north side it looks like.”

  Kat hung a hard right.

  Lowell steadied himself with a hand on the door. “Well,” he said. “Obviously now you are in a bad mood.”

  “I am not.”

  “Okay, you two. Watch these pedestrians up here.”

  “Right, I see ’em.”

  Lowell leaned toward me and pulled off his headset. I moved mine away from my ear.

  He nodded. “I find it’s always best to stay s
eated when she drives angry.”

  “I heard that,” Kat said.

  Butcher stared through the windshield. “It looks like we’ve got smoke up ahead, guys.”

  My chest fluttered, vibrating all the way down through my knees. I kicked each foot to shake it out.

  Cool air fed through my cracked window. The moon shone bright, unobstructed by clouds.

  As we crossed Wells Avenue I smelled the smoke.

  Gray ribbons wrapped around a second-floor walkway. Lowell put a hand on his door handle.

  A man in boxers and a white T-shirt ran to the rig, waving his arms. “Gun! He’s got a gun!”

  Butcher yelled to the backseats, “Hold up. Get back in.” He glanced at Kat and picked up the mic. “Let’s pull forward. Reno, Engine One’s on scene, two-story cinderblock multifamily residence with gray smoke showing from a first-floor unit. Advise all incoming units to stage out of the area—we have a report of a suspect on scene with a gun.”

  Kat pulled us past the rear alleyway. An apartment’s back window shattered with fire spitting out of it.

  “There,” Katrina said, pointing in her side-view mirror.

  A pale, lanky man hurtled over a juniper hedge and scrambled down the sidewalk. He wore a pair of tight black jeans and an unzipped polo jacket that flapped behind him. Two RPD patrol cars skidded to a stop in front of him. He hesitated and tried to double back, jumping over the hood of a parked car. He hit his boots midway and then slipped off headfirst onto the concrete. Kevlar-covered chests pounced on him like wasps on a barbecued chicken wing.

  “That’s him,” Katrina said. “That’s Biltman. They got him.”

  “All right,” Butcher said. “Let’s get in there.”

  Kat backed up the rig. Rolling coal-colored curtains flowed from the first floor. I hopped out and stretched a live-line to the door. Kneeling with the nozzle between my legs, I strapped on my mask.

  I was forgetting something.

  My axe.

  Lowell walked up, helmet in hand. “Let’s do it.” He seated his helmet and hoisted his axe, busting out the window beside the door.

  Tarry shadows shifted inside, levitating like specters. Owl eyes blinked from the blackness.

  Keep your cool, Aidan. Keep your cool.