3000 Degrees (8 page)

They'd come on the job together, Sully and Jay, in 1987. In some ways, they were strikingly similar: both were aggressively intelligent, almost cocky, eager to prove how smart they were. They were the top two graduates in their drill class, Jay a fraction of a point ahead. And part of the reason he took the test for the state police, not to mention the New York City Fire Department exam, was just to see how well he'd score. Sully started studying for a promotion almost as soon as he learned to drive the trucks; he made lieutenant after only six years, when he was thirty-one. Six years later, he was next in line to make captain.

Yet they were very different firefighters. Sully was a book man, methodical, controlled. If Engine 3 was second due—that is, if it was slotted to be the second engine on the scene, which meant it was supposed to tap a hydrant to supply the first-due guys lugging lines into the fire—he was going to be second in, even if it meant letting a slower truck overtake him. It was neither glamorous nor exciting, but it had to be done, and Sully believed in doing the job properly. Most of the department's procedures were outlined in manuals, handbooks, and memos, most of which Sully knew by heart and followed to the letter. It made him a good instructor, always lecturing at some academy or seminar.

Jay used to tease him about that. “Those who can't do,” he'd say, “teach.” It came out as a joke, but there was an undercurrent of a sneer. Jay thrived on chaos, action. “Ballsy,” Sully called him, always wanting to jump into the hottest, smokiest patch of hell he could find. If the first-due truck couldn't keep up, fuck 'em. Let those guys grab the hydrant, let Jay rush the flames. If he was driving Engine 3, Sully would be sitting next to him flipping through a thick pamphlet that listed the location of every hydrant and specifying which ones should be tapped for which addresses. “Will you get your head out of that fucking book,” Jay would yell at him. “Let's just grab a fucking hydrant and move.” Good fires were hard to come by in Worcester, and Jay didn't want to miss any chance to storm into the flames.

“Yep,” Sully said again. “Big one coming.” He drew in another breath, his heavy black mustache curling beneath his nostrils, air filling his lungs, puffing out his chest. “Three alarms. You smell it? I smell it.”

Jay snorted, shook his head. “Yeah, three alarms. And it'll be on the south side and we won't be going.”

He turned Engine 3 onto the apron in front of the station, steered it into a loping turn, angling the rear toward the third door from the left. Joe, Doug, and Mark hopped down from the back, flanked the truck near the back bumper, and guided Jay into the garage. The door rolled closed. Jay cut the motor and climbed down from the cab.

7

T
HE MATCH SPARKED AND BLOSSOMED INTO A FLAME
. J
ULIE
held it between her thumb and first two fingers, the nails chewed off and the tips raw, and touched the droplet of fire to a Christmas candle on the crate next to the bed. The wick caught, and an orange flower of light sprouted from a red wax stem. The darkness receded, but only a few feet; the edges of the room blurred into indistinct shadows.

It wasn't very big, the room, about the size of a county jail cell or a small clerk's office, which is what it had been before the warehouse closed down a decade before. The clutter made it seem more cramped, but it was still better than the shelters. The bed was in the middle: a wooden pallet layered with blankets, two spread across the slats as a mattress, five more on top for warmth. To the right of the bed, near the foot of the pallet, was a kerosene heater that fought back the chill on the coldest nights. Most of the clothes, filthy sweatshirts and worn jeans, were piled against the left wall, but a few tattered garments were scattered around the room, jumbled with the trash, scraps of half-eaten food, cellophane wrappers, paper bags. Opposite the bed was a tiny closet, on the floor of which was a box overflowing with cat feces. The human waste was deposited outside the sleeping quarters, in the hallways and downstairs near the door that opened onto the loading dock of Worcester Cold Storage. The place smelled like a sewer. Julie had gotten used to it.

She didn't live there anymore, not since she'd broken up with Tom. This was his place. He'd jimmied one of the doors last spring. Tom was good at that, finding places to squat. When he was with Celine, he broke them into a rusty trailer in a vacant lot at the foot of Grafton Street, on the edge of the old warehouse district. After she got sent to prison for drugs, he found his way into Worcester Cold Storage. It was supposed to be locked, sealed like a tomb, the few windows sheathed in plywood, the doors padlocked. But Tom could figure a way inside almost anything. He'd had a lot of practice, nineteen years of it, almost half his whole life living on the streets. Besides, no one seemed to care that he was living in there. Right after Halloween, a cop searched the building with his police dog. Part of it, anyway; the cop, gagging on the stench, left after a few minutes because he was afraid his dog would get sick.

It was perpetually dark inside, so Tom kept a flashlight hidden behind a steel beam on the loading dock. He would follow a spot of light through the maze of meatlockers and corridors, sidestepping the rubbish and muck, up to the office on the second floor, where he'd arranged the furniture. Other than the filth, though, the warehouse was good shelter. Sturdy, much more solid than the trailer, or most any other building for that matter. The brick walls were eighteen inches thick, and the floors were held up with timber joists the size of tree trunks that rested on columns of lumber and cast iron spaced every twelve feet. Because it had been used for cold storage, the walls were layered with insulation striated like bedrock: sheets of cork cemented together with asphalt, which were then covered with polyurethane and polystyrene as the years passed, and, in spots where the surface had to be smooth, a thin laminate. It wasn't exactly warm inside, but the walls held in the heat from the kerosene and kept out the worst arctic cold. A nor'easter could blow the city apart and Tom, huddled under his dirty blankets, likely wouldn't even hear it.

Julie had lived there with him, off and on, throughout the summer and most of the fall. Tom had gotten her pregnant right on this bed, sometime around Labor Day. But she didn't want to be his girlfriend anymore. Tom was jealous, which was perhaps understandable because Julie would hook up with other guys for a few weeks at a time, like that guy Scott she met in September at the day-labor pool. Tom had a temper, too. Sometimes, when he got mad, he would get rough with her, not beat her up or anything but push her around enough to make her miserable. He had a reputation for hitting women. A couple of old girlfriends had even gotten restraining orders against him. Julie left him—again—around Thanksgiving. She'd spent the first nights of December in a cheap hotel room with a fellow named Bruce, but her stuff was still in the warehouse. A lot of her clothes, her coloring book, her crayons. And her animals. Julie loved animals. She had a cat, a black short-hair, and a mongrel dog. The dog was sick, which is why she came back, to check on him.

She heard shuffling footsteps in the hallway. Tom. Julie had expected he would show up. She'd seen him outside, in the gloom near the Kenmore Diner, watching her as she ambled up Franklin Street and around the corner of Arctic toward the dock in the back. She knew he would follow her.

“What are you doin’ here?”

Tom stood just inside the room. The glow from the candle put his face into relief, made his cheeks more hollow, his eyes more sunken. His shadow, pale in the dusky light, was a slender thread slinking across the floor and partway up one wall.

“I'm checking on my dog,” Julie said. She sounded pouty, like a young child, which, fundamentally, she was. She was nineteen years old, and she had enough street savvy to survive—where to go for a free meal or, if she didn't have a boyfriend who would put her up for the night, a dry bed. But she had the mental and emotional capacity of a pubescent. In school, the other kids called her retard when she walked the hallways to her special-education classes. Julie hated that. She went to three different high schools in three years, bouncing back and forth between her mother's house and her father's apartment. She dropped out in her junior year. After that, she didn't want to live with either one of her parents. She was on the streets a few months later.

Julie sat on the edge of the bed. Tom dropped heavily next to her. He was scowling.

“What's wrong with you today?” Julie asked. She screwed her face, round and flat with wide-set eyes, into her own scowl.

“None of your fucking business.”

Julie started to say something back, but Tom cut her off. “I need a fucking cigarette,” he said. He poked Julie in the side, beneath the ribs, the way one would tickle a baby, only harder.

Julie swatted at his hand. “Leave me alone.”

Tom poked her again, aimed higher, jabbed his finger into her ribs.

She yelled it again: “Leave me alone.”

Tom gave her a disgusted look, then turned away. He fished a joint out of his pocket, lit it, took a long draw, leaned back against the wall as he exhaled. He didn't have to be on the streets. Just a few years ago, he'd been living in an apartment with Norma, the mother of his twin kids, under the rumble of the interstate. She got tired of fighting with him and threw him out. He went back to see her, told her he wanted to see his kids, yelling up at her from the street. She got a restraining order, too; said he'd threatened her.

His parents would take him in, wanted to take him in, prayed he would come home. They still lived in the house where they raised Tom and his brothers, barely two miles from the warehouse. Until a few months ago, he was the only one of their boys who wasn't locked up. His two big brothers had been locked up for almost twenty years, since that night they shot a man who happened to be in the liquor store they were robbing. And his other brother had spent most of the 1990s in prison for breaking into houses; he'd been paroled only six months earlier.

Some nights, a lot of nights, Tom's parents would drive through town looking for him. They would idle down Main Street after work, past the Victorian facades of downtown that gave way to gaudy bodegas and low-slung delis farther south. Near the corner of Charlton, they would ease off the gas, slowing to scan the faces of the drunks outside the Public Inebriate Program, which everyone called the PIP shelter. But they hardly ever saw him. It was almost as if he'd become a ghost, faded away into a netherworld. The streets his parents scoured may as well have been catacombs, a whole secret landscape of rickety shacks and damp alleys that civilians can't navigate because they can't see it, can't pick out the crevices and fissures where a man can lose himself on purpose.

And Tom had his reasons for getting lost. He was illiterate and slow-witted, not much brighter than Julie. He managed to get through high school, but he didn't learn much from the books he couldn't read. Made it hard to get a job, a good one to make enough to pay rent and utilities. On the streets, at least he could hustle when he wanted to. He could wash dishes and nail shingles to a roof and hire himself out at Preferred Labor for a few bucks a day, enough to buy his weed and some sandwiches and prepay a few minutes on his cell phone. The Mustard Seed, up on Piedmont Street, would give him a free meal, and the managers in some of the stores at the mall on the other side of the highway would let him linger inside, out of the cold or the rain, even if he wasn't buying anything. And he could usually get laid, get one of the women or girls in the same low orbit to put out.

“I want to talk,” he said to Julie.

“No.” She was lying across the bed, propped up on one elbow. She rubbed a crayon across the page of the coloring book opened in front of her, concentrating, being careful to stay inside the lines. “I don't want to talk to you.” Her sentences had the staccato rhythm of a child. “You're smoking weed. It bothers my nose. Stay away from me.”

Tom took another drag, held it, exhaled, lazy and slow. Then another. He stubbed out the roach, shifted on the bed, up onto his knees. He flashed out a hand, grabbed Julie's coloring book, tossed it to the floor. With his other hand, he grabbed her shoulder, rolled her over on her back.

“Get away from me,” Julie said. “Get off of me!”

Tom put his full weight on her, pinning her to the pallet bed, grabbing at her hips.

“Get off of me,” Julie said again. She pressed her hands against his chest, lifting his body enough to squirm out from beneath him. She pushed him, scrambled to a sitting position. Tom shoved her, tit for tat. She shoved him once more, hard, too. Tom lost his balance, flung a leg toward the floor to steady himself. His leg smacked the red candle, knocked it off the table. It landed in the clothes piled against the wall, disappeared into the dirty folds.

Tom caught his breath, settled back onto the bed. Julie glowered at him. He glowered back, the two of them making mean faces at each other, not saying anything.

After a moment, Julie crinkled her nose. “I smell something burning,” she said.

She looked around the room. She saw a wisp of smoke curling from the corner, rising from the clothes. The pile flickered with a faint orange light, like the glow of an oversize cigarette in the dark. Julie bolted upright, leaned toward the smoldering clothing. “Look what you did,” she said. “You set the clothes on fire.”

Tom stared at the jumble of cotton and nylon. The first tendrils of flame sprouted in the fabric, tiny shoots unfurling. He looked at Julie, still scowling.

He got up from the bed and stomped on the clothes, trying to smother the fire with his feet. But it was almost as if he'd angered the flames, forced them to fight back to survive. A spark leaped free, landed on a scrap of paper, erupted, multiplied. Tom picked up a filthy pillow and started flailing at the fire. He was trying to beat it to death; each swing pushed a gust of fetid air into the flames. An orange tongue licked at the wooden crate, wrapped around a slat, held on. Julie kicked at the night-stand. The flames were knee-high and hungry, searching for more fuel. The pillow in Tom's hands caught fire. He dropped it onto the burning clothes.