Pyro (15 page)

34. ALL THE DEAD GUYS ON THE WALL

Cynthia Rideout

December 13, F
RIDAY, 2011 HOURS

         
The men are sitting around grumbling. It’s the first grumbling I’ve heard out of Lieutenant Wollf since I came here. Gliniewicz, for once, is too exhausted to complain. Zeke is in the phone booth straightening out his private life, or trying to. I like Zeke, but it’s like watching a comic tragedy.

There’s a minor battle going on between the engine and the truck. I’m not sure who started it, but the lieutenants are barely speaking. Dolan and Gliniewicz have been snapping at each other.

Towbridge cracks jokes, and Gliniewicz is the butt of a lot of these. Sometimes he says things that are so hilarious I have to bite my lip to keep from laughing out loud.

Towbridge also likes to mock Slaughter, but only when he’s not in the room.

There has been bickering over who’s responsible for cleaning which part of the beanery. Over the location of the imaginary line on the apparatus floor that delineates the truck side from the engine side. Dolan says he’s not going to mop the engine side and he doesn’t want Gliniewicz’s mop on his side. Would you believe these are grown men?

The hubbub over who would cook dinner got so fierce the truck boycotted the dinner clutch and drove down to Toshio’s Teriyaki on Rainier.

The fires don’t usually start until around midnight, so I wonder, after passing out flyers and cleaning people’s yards all day, how many of the split-second decisions we need to make on the fire ground are going to be good ones? Dolan says it’s been so long since the people downtown have actually ridden a rig they’ve forgotten how much we do in a day.

The last two shifts wore me out. It’s not just the lack of sleep, but you have to factor in the stress.

Here’s what else happened today. Attack 28 was reprimanded for chewing out people and telling them the junk in their yards was a menace to the neighborhood. Engine 30 started a rubbish fire in somebody’s yard and burned almost a quarter of an acre. Both crews were told not to pass out flyers until next shift.

“That’s what happens when you step in the shit,” said Dolan. “You get to sit on the bench.”

Nobody’s happy about these extra duties. Funny, but my image of the fire department before I got in was a bunch of guys sitting around playing checkers and waiting for the next call. Not
even
close. Somebody is working in the station almost all day and a lot of the night. And frequently everybody’s working at once. There’s the housework, rig maintenance, equipment maintenance, the endless drilling, classes and workbooks, the daily memos, building inspections. Our calls only put us further behind.

Even the relatively sedate north end got into the fray. A captain on Ladder 8 took his crew to his grandmother’s house, where they were caught doing his grandmother’s yard work by a photographer from
The Seattle Times.

I noticed some things today. I noticed how hard Wollf tries to be his own man. In a profession where we’re all required to dress alike, there are so many little things he does to effect his uniqueness. For instance. He’s right-handed, but he wears his watch on his right wrist instead of the traditional left. He walks to work, the only guy in the department I know who does. He brings all his own meals to work instead of eating in the station clutch with everyone else.

Also, and this shocked me, the firefighter who lost his life in 1978 was Wollf’s father. “You wanna check, all you gotta do is drive down to Ten’s,” Towbridge said. “All the dead guys are on the wall down there.”

After three shifts the guys around here know more about me than they’ll
ever
know about Wollf. They know I have five brothers and two sisters. They know I have relatives who live on the reservation. That my family lives in Yakima. That I have two brothers who are alcoholics. That I went to junior college and trained to be a dental assistant before joining the department. They know I love field hockey and tennis but can’t swim.

Almost everything we know about Wollf is rumor, innuendo, or guesswork.

Tonight we spent an hour and a half at what they call a postfire critique held in the classroom upstairs at Station 25, a big, concrete-walled fire station at Thirteenth and Pine. Before we went upstairs, Wollf made a point to seek out the crew from Engine 25, and after some hemming and hawing, the captain and two crew members confirmed Chief Hertlein had turned off the fan at our last fire.

“When Pickett and the boot were still inside?” Dolan asked.

“You got it,” said the captain on Engine 25.

I’m too new to know the department protocol on such matters, but Dolan insists Hertlein is either a criminal or an idiot or both.

A postfire critique is run by a proctor, in this case Chief Eddings. First thing, she had somebody draw the intersection and building involved. Then she had each unit commander—in the order the units had arrived on scene—explain what they saw when they arrived, what their orders were, and what they ended up doing.

Wollf was visibly nervous talking in front of a group. He told our side of the story, and then the stage was turned over to the captain on Engine 25. Engine 25 arrived, laid a two-hundred-foot 1
³
⁄
_⁴
-inch line, and sent the driver and one person to the hydrant for a supply. Engine 25’s crew kicked in doors on the first floor and then came up to the second after Pickett and I found the fire unit. They masked up and went in behind us. They made it sound as if they were right on our tails, but we were in and out before they even got in.

It was at this point that Eddings mentioned Pickett’s burns and asked me to explain what we did inside the fire unit. I told how we’d been stopped short by the heat before we reached the bedrooms, how Pickett had rushed out of the apartment. “Was the fan working when you went in?” Wollf asked me.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m asking the questions here,” Eddings said.

“So it was clear inside?” Wollf continued, ignoring her.

“It was clear at first.”

“Then what?”

“The air got incredibly hot. Then Pickett got burned.”

“Was the fan still running when you came out?”

“No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir.”

Eddings seemed to miss the significance of the fan getting shut off, because after everybody was finished, she asked if we didn’t think the main point here would be to find out why we had a fire department injury and to prevent such an occurrence in the future. The room got real quiet. I thought the cause of Pickett’s injury was obvious. Somebody shut off the fan when we were inside.

“Here’s what I think,” said Eddings, pacing back and forth. “I think Ms. Rideout was responsible for Pickett’s injuries.”

“That’s not fair and you know it!” Wollf said, jumping to his feet. “We just explained how Pickett got burned.”

“Just hear me out,” said Eddings. “There were a couple of things done wrong here, and Rideout was there each time.”

“This is not even how a postfire critique is run,” Wollf said angrily. “You said yourself the idea is not to place blame. If a member of my crew needs union representation, you should tell us before you start.”

“This is not a disciplinary hearing, Wollf. Don’t get excited.”

“Look who’s talking,” whispered Towbridge.

Eddings was angry now. “It seems to me anytime we go into a fire with a probationary firefighter, we need to take extra precautions. In this instance, Pickett went in with a probationary firefighter, and she got lost. While they were separated—”

“I was never lost and we didn’t get separated,” I whispered to Lieutenant Wollf.

“She was never lost,” Wollf said aloud, “and they weren’t separated.”

“Are you going to keep interrupting, or are you going to let me finish?” Eddings asked.

“Fine,” Wollf said. “But she wasn’t lost.”

“According to Pickett they were.”

“That’s not what he told us,” said Wollf.

I was in the middle of a tug-of-war.

“The way I understand it,” continued Eddings, “there was improper supervision of a probationary firefighter. They went in in front of a hose line. The probationary firefighter opened a window which was not in the fire room, which caused the dynamics of the ventilation to change.”

“Can I comment now?” Wollf asked, standing.

“You may not.”

“I thought this was a fact-finding mission.”

“You can just sit back down.”

“Just
your
facts?” There was enough grumbling in the room that Eddings capitulated. Wollf said, “You’re right. They went in before the hose line. But the line was charged, and that the hose still hadn’t come in by the time they were leaving was not anything they could have foreseen.”

“That’s why we wait, isn’t it?” said Eddings.

“While we’re waiting people are dying. They went in on a bubble of perfectly good air and were doing fine. Sure, Rideout broke out a window. But judging by the char on the ceiling, the heat wasn’t heading toward that window. It was heading for the front door which became the largest exit after the fan got shut off.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Eddings. “The place would have been untenable without a fan.”

“It
was
untenable,” said Wollf. “That’s why Pickett got burned.”

“Are you saying Engine Twenty-five turned off the fan?”

“Chief Hertlein turned it off.”

“That’s ridiculous. It probably ran out of gas.”

“It wasn’t out of gas. We checked.”

The classroom grew quiet. “If there’s somebody here who wants to back up Lieutenant Wollf, I’d like to hear them, because what you’re doing, Wollf, is you’re accusing one of our deputy chiefs of compromising a fire operation, and that is a serious accusation.”

The room REALLY got quiet.

Even though there were witnesses, nobody was going to back him up.

It was then that we saw Chief Hertlein in the doorway.

“Sorry I’m late,” Hertlein said. “Now, what’s this about a fan?”

“Lieutenant Wollf seems to think you shut off the fan at Eleventh and Fir,” Eddings said.

Hertlein stepped forward, hands clasped behind his back. He was wearing his white chief’s shirt and black uniform trousers and had a look in his eyes that would have stopped a cobra. “I think I would remember if I had.”

If I’d watched him turn off the fan Sunday night,
I
wouldn’t have spoken up. Apparently everybody else felt the same way because nobody said beans.

Afterward Towbridge said, “Don’t Chief Eddings look like Miss Piggy in a chief’s uniform?” Tow always made everything funny.

35. BINGO, BIDDIES, BUDWEISER,
BANK ROBBERIES, AND RIOTS

According to Earl Ward

         
I know he’s working today, but the station is empty every time I drive by.

Jesus. The memories make me sick to my stomach at the same time they get me excited, which is something I can’t quite figure. You’d think you saw another guy about to dink your woman you’d want to kill him, but I got so excited I couldn’t even watch the whole thing. It’s confusing, but most of my life has been confusing. Period.

I slide into the Red Apple parking lot and touch up my lipstick in the rearview mirror. With the red wig and glasses, not even my own mother would recognize me. In fact, she didn’t. I inspect the contents of my purse. There’s the cash—seven dollars and twenty-five cents. My ID. Half a pack of gumdrops and a cigarette lighter. Oh, yes. And a pack of ciggies. I found out the hard way it’s not enough to have a cigarette lighter and say you were smokin’. You gotta produce smokes.

In the reflection of the windows at the Red Apple I look like a middle-aged babe who was maybe hot at one time. I stroll around the store and catch the eye of a couple of hungover black dudes who I know right away done time. I shake them off and buy a six-pack of soft drinks, and by ten o’clock I’m driving past Pennington’s place. The house is dark. So is the guest house in back.

J’s probably out driving the old lady to the opera.

I’m so jittery I can barely read a newspaper article even when it’s about me. Mom says I live on caffeine and
Judge Judy,
but that’s not true. I eat doughnuts; that’s where I get my strength.

This is Friday, and I know from J’s letters the old gal likes to mingle with the hoity-toity on the weekends. The symphony. Live theater. She could teach my mother a few things about energy—maybe explain there’s more to life than biddies, bingo, and Budweiser.

I drive down to the lake and come up the hill on Fullerton Avenue. I like these lesser-known neighborhoods. Every mile I put on this old Dodge has a purpose. If I don’t light up this neighborhood tonight, I’ll give it a dose of flash some other night.

When he started the Boy Scouts, Ben Franklin said a smart man prepares for the future. That’s what I do too.

Here’s what’s so cute about me and Mom. The front pages are plastered with my exploits, which she gobbles up like the funny papers, and the whole time she don’t even know I’m the one she’s readin’ about. She knew, she’d shit a brick.

Neither of us ever mentions my time in Salem. Around our house that twenty-five years just evaporates like so much vapor off the roof. One thing Mom’s good at is letting things go. Not me. Every little thing I keep thinkin’ about. Period.

I park the car on a dark intersection near East Columbia and Thirtieth, and before you can squeeze a chigger I’m taking a catnap.

I wake in a cold sweat. I mean, the brassiere full of newspapers is even wet. My panties are wet. I start up the car and begin driving, turning the heater up full blast tryin’ to dry out. It’s not midnight yet.

Think about this. For ten thousand years whenever a man, woman, or child got cold, he or she or it could start a fire. In a cave. Under a tree. Beside a rock. Now all of a sudden it’s illegal. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to start a warming fire when I’m freezing? A small, controlled fire. It’s nuts.

In the car I dreamed about the firefighter they lost years ago.

If I’d had any gumption, I would have stuck around, but I was just a kid, so I panicked and ran off to Oregon, which was a mistake from the giddy-up.

I had the $417 I stole from Mom’s boyfriend, Mr. Houtz, but even with all that money I got depressed the minute I got off the Greyhound. I got a room and holed up for three days. I met up with Mildred and her friends in downtown Portland, and when she asked me for the twenty dollars and said I could fuck her, why I just naturally felt it would be best to oblige. I never had sex with a woman before that. Actually, I never had sex then neither.

Mildred took me down behind this building and laid herself down on some cardboard in the alley and then laughed when I spilled all over myself taking my pants down. I guess I got a little previous. I wanted my money back and she wanted to keep it, and before I knew it my hands were around her neck and then not too much later I was in the back of a police cruiser.

Bad luck all the way around.

Even in the Portland clink everybody was reading about the fires in Seattle. The headline I remember most said, “Cowardly Firebug Flees Area?”

It still gets my goat that they called me a coward.

Let me tell you this. Arson is one of the few crimes where the authorities are there just minutes after the fact. I guess bank robberies and riots would be the others. Given that dynamic, you know it takes an extremely brave person to do what I do, brave and smart. Period.