3000 Degrees (7 page)

But most first-responder runs didn't amount to much more than baby-sitting until the ambulance showed up. Like this one, chugging to a gym on Millbrook Street where a diabetic had passed out while lifting weights. The men from Engine 3 would keep him warm, monitor his vital signs, wait for the paramedics to take over. A useful task. There were worse calls to get. People dialed 911 for ridiculous reasons: an upscale private club used the firemen and the ambulance drivers to bounce its drunks, insisting their stumbling belligerence was merely a gentleman's seizure. Sunburns and menstrual cramps became emergencies after midnight. One of the engine companies was on a first-name basis with a petite homosexual hustler who called every few months complaining about his bleeding rectum.

It wasn't the kind of action Jay had signed up for. Jay lusted for fire, monstrous, voracious flames, untamable incinerators, the infernos that hardly ever reared up in Worcester anymore. He'd been through a couple, even taped a picture inside his locker to remind himself it could happen again. It was black-and-white, reprinted from a newspaper, a three-family tenement disintegrating in flames two years earlier. Jay wrote in the margin, “My first big blaze!” He tolerated the first-responders the way an athlete tolerates wind sprints: required drudgery for a chance to play in the big game.

At least it was his night to drive. Jay mashed the pedal to the floor, flattening it with his boot, accelerating north on Grove. Cars on the road slowed, moved to the curb, parting before the shriek and roar of the engine. Jay backed off the gas at the corner of Glennie Street, pulled the wheel around to the right, hand over hand, leaning into the turn. The best part of a bad run, sitting high and forward, a captain on a flat sea of blacktop. “When I'm driving Engine 3,” he'd tell his father every so often, “I'm living every little boy's fantasy.” Which he knew was true because it had been his fantasy.

Jay had been hanging around firehouses since he was old enough to pedal his bike to the Park Avenue station, a few blocks from the house where he grew up. When he was a little older, he'd be at headquarters twice a month with Explorer Post 201 listening to one of the veterans talk about the finer and more gruesome aspects of the job—how to lay a hose or smother a chemical fire or cut an unconscious passenger out of a mangled Buick. He clipped stories of spectacular fires from the newspaper, pasted them into scrapbooks, read them, studied them, imagined himself in an oversize coat and a heavy helmet, rushing into the flames and carrying out a body, limp and barely alive. At night, he'd lie in bed listening to the chatter on a Bearcat 210XL eighteen-channel scanner, waiting for the three telltale tones. Then he'd jostle his father awake. “C'mon, dad,” he'd jabber. “We're going to a fire.” If the flames were close enough, if the hour was early enough, Jim Lyons always took his boy. If the fire was stubborn, if it took the men longer to wash it away than Jim felt like waiting, he would sometimes leave his son. He knew Mike McNamee would get him home.

Mike lived across the street in a yellow Cape on Saxon Road, a winding semicircle in a leafy neighborhood west of downtown. Jay was twelve when Mike and Joanne moved in with their two daughters. A real smoke-eater, living right outside his bedroom window. And on Rescue 1! Those guys went to all the fires, got to do the coolest work. Mike would tell Jay about the big fires, the worst fires, the scariest fires, feed his imagination. Some nights, if Jay didn't have school the next morning, Mike would find him a spare bunk at Central Street, let him spend the night like a real fireman.

It seemed to be hardwired into him, Jay's fascination with fighting fires. No one in his family, four generations of Worcester stock, had ever worked for the department, except for the time his great-grandfather took a spot on a bucket brigade. But Jay was enthralled with the tradition, the gallantry. It was a romantic image, one seared into his mind by the heat of a fire one cold winter morning. Three sharp brays from the Bearcat woke him up. The fire was close, only five houses away. Jay scrambled out of bed, pulled on some clothes, and sprinted down the sidewalk. The flames had begun with a loose electrical wire, a spark that burrowed into the wall, fed on insulation and studs, then broke through, grabbing curtains and furniture and wood moldings. When Jay got there, the whole house was burning bright, wrapped in fire and bellowing smoke. The first engines were at the curb, men dragging the line to a hydrant, wrenching the coupling into place.

One of Jay's neighbors stood barefoot in the street, screaming. “There's someone inside! The old guy's still inside!”

Three firefighters forced open the front door, crawled to the kitchen, all the way in the back. They felt a body on the floor near the door, an elderly man choked unconscious. The firemen hauled him out the back and started working on him, pumping his chest and breathing hard into his mouth. It was too late. The old man died at City Hospital less than an hour later.

But they'd tried to save him. That's what Jay remembered, the important part. Years later, in the winter of 1983, Jay wrote an essay for his application to Clark University. In cramped and slanted cursive, he wrote about Explorer Post 201, and then told the whole story of the fire—“a significant experience or achievement that has special meaning for you,” according to the instructions on the essay sheet—from the moment he woke up until the old man died at the hospital.

“‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’is a quote that many people would use to describe firefighters,” he wrote at the end of his essay.

Seeing these men rush into this house made me wonder why they do this. Why did these men risk their lives for someone they didn't even know? The answer is not found in the quote, because these men are not fools, and the answer is not because they are being paid for it. The answer itself is very simple, this is their life, the life of saving others.

Sixteen years later, on a night just as cold as that winter morning, he was behind the wheel of a Worcester Fire Department engine. He wasn't saving anyone. He was going to hold the hand of a passed-out diabetic, play nursemaid for some guy who forgot to snarf down a candy bar. That was his life, another goddamned medical assist.

E
ngine 3 rolled through the gloaming, the road ahead strobing red and white, puddles of light swirling across the blacktop and the sidewalks and the storefronts. Jay liked the view from the cab better after dark, the flashes and reflections, the streaky contrast of sharp colors against the muted gray of night. He stopped complaining about the task at hand, even if it had been only to himself. He was lucky to be back on a fire truck, living his little-boy dream. A second chance at a fantasy—how many guys got that?

He couldn't remember exactly how he'd screwed everything up. He could piece the main narrative together from what he'd read in the newspapers and what the prosecutor argued at his trial and what the other cops said before they kicked him off the force. But the details were lost, washed away in a flood of foamy beer.

It had happened four years ago, on a night like this, when the sky was cold and gray and autumn was losing ground to winter. He was sitting behind the wheel of his car, drunk, staring at the black pool of the Atlantic splashing out to the horizon, spilling into the abyss beyond the curve of the earth. He fiddled with a .38 revolver in his lap. His personal sidearm, not the one the Massachusetts State Police had given him along with a badge three years before.

He'd left the Worcester Fire Department in 1992. After more than four years of riding Engine 1, Jay was restless, tired of waiting for alarms that hardly ever rang. The frantic chatter he'd heard on his Bearcat—two, three, four fires a night—had been replaced by single tones and long hours of silence. He looked into his own future, saw three decades drag out, him sitting in a worn-out chair around a chipped table, his belly starting to fold over his belt, muscles melting, crazy with boredom, waiting for something to burn. So when the state police offered him a job, he took it. Maybe policing would have more action. Maybe he'd catch a killer or a rapist or a bank robber. If nothing else, he'd be in a cruiser, moving, accelerating. His mother warned him not to go. “Stay with the fire department,” she'd told him. “It's what you've always wanted to do.” He should've listened to her.

The strange thing was, he liked being a cop. At first, anyway. He patrolled the two-lane roads and drowsy hamlets near the Vermont border for eighteen months, then was rewarded with a transfer to Martha's Vineyard. He thought he'd be happy there, out in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by sea breezes that smelled like the beach at Green Harbor, smelled like all those boyhood summers in his parents’ cottage. During the warmer months, tourists swarmed the island, pretty girls with money and suntans, a smorgasbord for a handsome young man in a well-pressed uniform.

Then came Labor Day. The whole place cleared out, eighty-five thousand summer folk leaving all at once. Only the fishermen and the tradesmen and the drunkards stayed behind. Shops and restaurants shuttered. August mistrals gave way to February gales raking the desolate rock. There wasn't much for anyone to do, and less for a cop: the crimes were minor, and the miscreants were back on the same streets two days later, eye-balling the pig who'd handcuffed them.

Jay suffered through one winter, put in another summer tour, then asked to be shipped back to the mainland. In early November 1995, his request was denied. That's how he ended up staring at the water, fiddling with a gun. He'd started drinking at four o'clock that afternoon. It only got him more worked up. By ten o'clock—this was where the details got fuzzy—he was hammered and ranting, complaining about drug dealers, how the island had to be cleaned up and the bad guys taught a lesson. He got in his car and drove to Oak Bluffs, one of the villages on the Vineyard. Downtown was a big gray house where a drug dealer lived, a bad guy with a record going back to the Nixon administration. Jay himself had arrested the guy a few months earlier with a hundred bags of heroin. Now he was out on bail, loosed on the same claustrophobic island.

Jay stuck his arm out the window of his car, pointed the pistol at the house. He squeezed the trigger, once, twice, two quick shots through the clapboards. One lodged in the couch, the other in a bookcase. Then Jay squealed into the night, thirsty, back to a barroom. An hour later, he returned to Oak Bluffs, joyriding in front of the Strand Theater, firing a half-dozen more rounds into the air.

He was arrested, of course. The state police fired him, a jury eventually convicted him, a judge gave him two years in jail, all but ninety days suspended. With time off for good behavior, Jay left the Dukes County House of Correction in February 1997. He hadn't taken a drink in more than two years by then, ever since that night with the gun. But he was still an ex-con and a disgraced cop. He found work driving a school bus, manning the door at a nightclub, substitute teaching. Odd jobs, nothing steady. He wished he'd never left the fire department.

Mike McNamee finally asked him about coming back. Mike had been one of the only people who thought Jay should be a cop, at least try it. “Look at it this way,” he'd told him back in 1992. “If you don't do it, you're always gonna wonder. You're always going to think,
what if?
What if I'd been a cop instead of a fireman? Take a leave of absence. You can take, what, five years? If you don't like it you can always come back. What've you got to lose?”

Five years later, Jay thought he knew the answer to that question: almost everything. Now Mike was offering a shot at redemption. They were standing at the foot of Mike's driveway, a warm spring day in 1997, nubby red buds on the hydrangeas, baby leaves on the maples scattering the sunlight. Jay was sweaty from a run. He heard Mike ask him, “When's your five years up?”

Jay gave him a curious look. “My five years? What do you mean?”

“You took a five-year leave of absence, right? When's it up?”

Jay did the math in his head. “Um, August. Why?”

“What about coming back? I mean, to the department. You ever think about it?”

He'd never stopped thinking about it. When he was a cop, he still kept his gear by the front door, his boots lined up just so in the foyer, his turnout coat hanging on peg. “Yeah, of course,” Jay answered. “But, you know, I can't.”

“Actually, I think you might be able to.”

Jay snapped his head around, bore his eyes into Mike's.

“I don't want to get your hopes up,” Mike said. “But I think you can still go back. I don't think there's anything on the books that says you can't, even with a record. I know there's a thing in there about felonies, but …” He paused, unsure of the legal technicalities. “Look,” he said, “why don't you start researching the law.”

Jay dug through the civil service rules, found the page with the right loophole. He hadn't spent enough time in jail to disqualify himself. Mike, meanwhile, went to see the chief, Dennis Budd, to put in a good word for Jay. It wasn't hard. Budd had always liked Jay, thought he'd been a good fireman the first time around. In July, Budd agreed to give Jay a job. Jay told him, “You won't be disappointed, Chief. I won't let you down, I promise.”

T
he diabetic survived. The ambulance arrived just after Engine 3, packed him up, took him to the hospital. Jay trudged back to the truck, Lieutenant Sullivan a few steps behind him. The other three men—Joe McGuirk, Mark Fleming, Doug Armey—climbed into the back. Jay kicked the engine over and started the slow drive back to Grove Street. They'd be back to the station by quarter to six, plenty of time before dinner.

A few blocks away from the gym, Sully shifted in his seat, pushed his shoulders back, gave the air an exaggerated sniff. “Gonna be a big one tonight,” he said. He was smiling. “I can smell it.”

Jay gave him a sideways glance. Sully said that almost every night, and he was wrong every time. Jay had been back on the job for more than two years, but Engine 3 still hadn't seen a fire that a good squirt from a two-and-a-half couldn't handle. The other three guys on the truck, Mark, Doug, and Joe, had never been in a real burner. They were all fairly new, only a couple of years out of drill school even though Joe, at thirty-eight, was the oldest man on the truck. The three rookies were part of the reason Jay had been assigned to Engine 3. He was only thirty-four, but a grizzled veteran compared to everyone but Sully. If Jay hadn't left for five years, he was sure he'd be running his own truck by now. As it was, he was on the promotions list for lieutenant, having taken the test after rejoining the fire department. He was just waiting for a slot to open up. Early next year, he figured, maybe February. In the meantime, putting Sully and Jay on the same engine made sense, two qualified men to supervise three rookies. If things got hairy, Sully knew he could count on Jay to help look after everyone.