3000 Degrees (3 page)
“It scares you,” Joanne repeated. “Really. Why?”
“No windows.”
Mike said it casually, a statement of obscure fact. He wasn't immediately frightened, viscerally afraid, like he was that night on Jacques Street, his heart banging against his ribs, his lungs gasping short, shallow breaths. This fear was pragmatic, an educated projection of potential calamity, like that of an engineer who sees the future collapse of a bridge by looking at its badly drawn blueprints.
Joanne studied the building again, trying to focus it through her husband's eyes, a fireman's eyes. A lot of buildings scared firemen, if only because they had learned to mentally overlay the walls and foundations with heat, smoke, and flames. Civilians looked at a strip mall and saw a dry cleaner, a convenience store, and a deli, separate businesses lined up in a row. Firemen saw one long box divided into individual compartments connected by a single airspace between the roof and the dropped ceilings, a passage for flames to sneak from one shop to the next. Where civilians saw a hospital, firemen saw a couple hundred sick people who would need to be carried out, some tethered to respirators that couldn't be disconnected. A Wal-Mart or a Home Depot, through a fireman's prism, became a stockpile of flammable synthetics and explosive chemicals stored under a roof held up by open-web bar joists, a supporting structure that was light and strong but that in the heat of a fire could collapse in less than ten minutes and with little warning. “If that ever goes up,” firemen would say, nodding toward a shuttered mill or a fully occupied high-rise, “I hope I'm not working.
When
it goes up, I hope I'm not on.”
Mike had to worry about such buildings. He was a district chief now, in charge of the entire northern half of the city for his shift; at every working fire, he would be the initial supervisor, deciding how to attack and when to retreat. No fire was routine, but most were predictable and, given enough time and rogue sparks, could be practiced. Hundreds of the city's ubiquitous triple-decker houses had caught fire during the past couple of decades, and the next one to go up probably wouldn't burn much differently than all the others before it.
Worcester Cold Storage was a different beast altogether. The sheer size of it was intimidating. A fire running loose inside had too many places to hide and too many places to spread, wide pastures of littered floors on which to grow and thrive. A small fire, found quickly, could be eliminated. A big fire, one that got a jump on the men and slipped through the hallways and into the elevator shafts, flanking, surrounding, would be impossible to control. Worst of all were the unbroken walls, blank stacks of brick rising from the pavement. The building had been designed to hold in cold, which meant it would also retain heat, tremendous temperatures. That was also why there were so few windows, only a handful for light in one isolated stairwell. With no windows, there would be no easy vents, no way to bleed out the heat and the smoke and the poison.
“I'm telling you,” Mike said again, “that building scares me. It scares the shit out of me.”
“So hope you never get a fire in there.” Joanne patted Mike's leg when she said it. “How many pies should we get?”
J
oanne used to worry about Mike, years ago, before Kate was born and he was a rookie and they lived in a rented apartment on Vincent Avenue, two miles from the Winslow Street station. They had the top floor of a triple-decker that sat on a hill overlooking a housing project and, if the wind was blowing a particular way on a hot summer night, it would gather the echo of sirens and carry them into the living room, deposit them right beside her. “Don't you die now,” she would whisper to her husband, riding around on the streets below. “Don't you dare die now.”
The fear, reflexive and unexpected, always startled her, maybe even embarrassed her. Her mother had always told her, “You don't borrow worry.” A fine piece of Irish-Catholic fatalism, but it was true and Joanne knew it. She chased away the dread almost as quickly as it came. Besides, she'd never been afraid of fire, and the sound of a siren was familiar, almost comforting. When she was a little girl, she would chase after fire trucks and police cruisers with her father, following the whooping and the wailing just because they were curious.
She'd done the same thing with Mike, too. When she met him, he was a carpenter, a shaggy college dropout swinging a hammer for nonunion wages. He'd gotten himself on the hiring list for the Worcester Fire Department, but only for practical reasons; fighting fires was a civil service job, secure, recession-proof, paid a good wage. He had no particular passion for the trade, no romantic visions of heroism or jittery cravings for danger. It was just a good job in a bad economy. He was waiting for his appointment to the training academy when Joanne saw the change in him, watched a curiosity swell up inside and ripen into an obsession, stood right next to Mike while he stared into a burning house, mesmerized, tantalized.
It happened on the Fourth of July, 1972. The firebugs all came out on Independence Day, flitting through the summer dusk, setting light to scrub brush and trash cans and the occasional house. Every year, the firemen would lurch around the city, screaming from one hot spot to the next, squirting each tangle of smoldering garbage or tinder-dry grass, stalling every so often at a recalcitrant blaze gnawing at something more substantial, like a car or a shopkeeper's goods.
Mike and Joanne went out to watch pieces of the city burn that night, cruising the streets in his gray Belvedere. At about ten-thirty that night, they stopped on Pleasant Street near the corner of Hudson, where, a few minutes earlier, someone had put a match to the front porch of a triple-decker. One of the residents tried to douse the fire with buckets of water, but the flames quickly climbed the walls, the fire rising on its own heat, finding a hold in the clapboard, then pushing itself higher.
By the time Mike and Joanne parked the car and walked closer, the third floor was engulfed in throbbing orange. The street was splattered with swirls of red and white lights from the fire trucks, and the air had a bitter, ashy sting. Mike and Joanne watched men in heavy coats and rubber boots up to the middle of their thighs spread across the lawns and the street, cranking valves on the pumper trucks, steadying ladders against the smoldering walls, a couple more bounding up the porch stairs and through the front door. Smoke swirled from a third-floor window, balls of black cotton tumbling over each other in a race up to the sky.
A hand poked through the cloud, then a head, then a full torso. A fireman leaned over the sill. A blast of flame erupted behind him, and fire shot over his head in fat, snapping tendrils. “I need a line up here,” the man shouted. “C'mon, let's go, I need another fucking line.”
Mike stood next to Joanne at the curb, transfixed. He could almost feel the heat on the back of his neck, his ears, taste the smoke in the back of his throat, scratching at his esophagus. “Goddamn,” he whispered, “that guy's got tremendous balls.” Then he felt a twitch in his gut. Adrenaline. He looked at Joanne. “I could do that,” he said.
She looked at him, turned her head away, a trace of a smile on her lips. “I know you could,” she said.
“No. Joanne, I can
do
that. I
want
to do that.”
She said it again. “I know.”
Mike answered his first alarm as a Worcester fireman six months later, clinging to the side of a 1951 Maxim Junior Aerial chugging through a sleet storm at forty miles an hour. A few months after that, almost exactly one year after he'd been hypnotized by the flames on Hudson Street, Mike watched ten people die in an inferno that swept through a flophouse on Main Street, the deadliest fire in the city's history. There were too many others to count, the tenements and factories, the triple-deckers and cheap hotels, where Mike had crawled into the smoke and the flames and walked back out. He'd never even gotten badly hurt. A few bumps and bruises, the occasional blistering burn and tufts of singed hair, and, once, a wrenched spine from the cannon stream of a wayward hose that threw him off a porch and a dozen yards through the air, onto a concrete sidewalk. He missed a few weeks after that one. But he always went back to work.
You don't borrow worry. It was true and Joanne knew it and, in time, she came to believe it.
D
AWN WAS SILVERY GRAY, LIKE A NEW DIME, MORNING LIGHT
glowing through unbroken clouds. It was December 3, 1999, a Friday, and Joe McGuirk was driving southwest toward Charlton, the twilight rising in his rearview mirror. If he hurried, he could put in five hours, maybe six, frame a stack of two-by-fours into skeletal walls, and still get home to Linda by noon.
Joe didn't build many houses. He preferred remodeling jobs, putting in new kitchens and bathrooms, self-contained projects where he could handle most of the work himself, not have to hire any labor. He was the sole proprietor of McGuirk &Son Construction, which was something of a misnomer because his only son was just ten years old. Joe liked the name, though. He'd been calling his company that since 1989, the year he got his contractor's license and the same year Everett was born. “And Son,” Joe had reasoned, made his outfit sound bigger, older, more established. And it wasn't technically untrue.
He was a self-taught carpenter. An electrican and plumber and mechanic, too. If it could be hammered, sawed, bolted, wired, screwed, caulked, Joe could figure it out. He might get zapped eight times trying to fix a busted switch with the power connected, but he got the lights to work. Linda believed he could do anything, because she'd never seen him not be able to do something. When he was younger, he worked as a handyman at the Jewish Community Center, where he met a lot of people who wanted their peeling Victorians painted. He did that for a few years, studying at night for his contractor's license and practicing on the four-room bungalow he and Linda bought before they got married. He gutted every room, fixed it up nice, then built a second story on top. After that, he blew out the back wall, added another room, ripped out the kitchen again, put in a new one, then remodeled it a third time. With the additions, the deck, and the garage, he'd built on every inch of their property by the early nineties. So he found a new piece of land, out in the woods in Rochdale, in the wooded valleys southeast of the city, and started over. He worked for hours, absorbed in the labor, the headlights from his truck illuminating the joists and the columns he pieced together on his own. He framed the entire thing, twenty-five hundred square feet, in two weeks. (Joe did everything fast; he jogged behind the lawn-mower.) He painted the clapboards pink and bolted green shutters to the windows and moved in with Linda, Everett, and Emily, his little girl, five years earlier, right before Thanksgiving in 1994.
Funny how it worked out, Joe making a living building things, and still making a good buck at it even though it was only a side job. He started contracting because he couldn't get on the Worcester Fire Department. He'd always wanted to be a fireman, like his dad, Wild Bill McGuirk, and his big brother Billy. He took the damned test every chance he got since his senior year in high school. Scored pretty well, too, way up in the high nineties. But something always got in the way at hiring time. In the early eighties, it was affirmative action, the city trying to hire more minorities in a department dominated by white guys. Some years, the budget was too tight. Mostly, though, it was the military veterans who kept edging him out: a man who came out of the army moved to the top of the hiring list if he passed the test. So Joe would score a ninety-seven and lose out to a vet with a ninety-three.
In the summer of 1995, after fifteen years of frustration, Joe realized he needed an act of God, or at least the state legislature, to make him a fireman. He talked to a friend, a city councillor named Wayne Griffin. Wayne liked Joe, had known his family forever. Joe built the deck on the back of Wayne's house, hammered his campaign signs together, stood on a corner holding one on Election Day. Wayne explained a home-rule petition to him, how the state could make a law that would give him preference on account of his father having been a fireman. It would have to pass the city council and the house of representatives and then the governor would have to sign it, but it could be done.
A few days later, Joe told Linda, “I'm going to Boston. I'm going to see the governor.”
“Cut the shit,” Linda said.
“No, really. I'm going to see the governor. I gotta do something.”
Joe drove to Boston, up to Beacon Hill, staked out Gov. William Weld. He caught up to him in an elevator. “Governor, my name is Joe McGuirk,” he said, just blurted out the words. “My father, Bill McGuirk, was a Worcester fireman and he died in the line of duty and I've been trying to get on the job for fifteen years, since 1980, I keep taking the test and getting good scores but I'm always a couple of points short because I don't get the preference from my dad having been on the job so I wanted to try a home-rule petition and what do you think?”
Weld stood there for a moment, not saying anything. Then he grinned. “I like you,” he told Joe. “You get the bill on my desk and I'll sign it.”
Wayne wrote it up, convinced the city council to pass it, sent it along to the statehouse. The house passed it and, in November 1995, Weld signed it. There it was, in black and white, Chapter 197 of the Acts and Resolutions of 1995. “An Act Relative to Civil Service Preference of Certain Members of the Family of William T. McGuirk for Appointment to the Fire Department of the City of Worcester.” His very own law. He had to wait almost two more years before the city hired him, at the beginning of September 1997, but at least he was on. Some of the other guys didn't like it, thought he'd pulled one string too many, got an unfair edge. “Don't worry,” he'd tell Wayne. “I'm winning them over. One by one, I'm winning them over.”
He'd been riding Engine 3 out of the Grove Street station for two years. He liked the job, probably more than he thought he would. Hadn't seen much fire, though. A couple of house fires his rookie year, one big enough to draw a television cameraman who framed Joe in one of his shots. The guys called him “Hollywood Joe” for a while. Hardly anything burned after that, though, at least not on his shift. But at least he was a fireman now. Contracting was what he did in his spare time, same as plowing the streets after a snowstorm.
