Pyro (2 page)

2. THE GOD BLESS AMERICA FIREHOUSE AND LOUNGE

         
Chief Hertlein wanted to call in the cops but was soon talked out of it. The administration didn’t want his comments about Coburn’s widow to be made public. The witnesses were sworn to silence, in some cases threatened into it.

While the story changed from telling to telling, everybody knew I was now the department bad boy. For months afterward I was transferred from one station to the next. Perhaps because he’d been promoted and was using his newfound power to bounce me all over the city, to the rank and file Hertlein had become the goat and I the hero. The bad boy hero.

My current assignment was one I could walk to, Station 6, on the corner of Twenty-third and Yesler, catty-corner from the Douglass-Truth Library and directly west of the Catholic Community Services building. Six’s was an Art Deco style firehouse with a stubby flagpole above the center of two bright red apparatus bay doors. At night neon lightning bolts above the doors dazzled children and drug addicts alike.

The building housed two units, Attack 6 and Ladder 3. I would be working on Ladder 3, my first truck assignment since June. I was ecstatic.

The north side of the bay housed the engine, the south side the truck, both pieces of apparatus stuffed into their tiny spaces like bratwurst into a glutton’s mouth. From outside it didn’t look as if either rig could squeeze through the doors.

I was placing my turnout boots-and-pants combo, coat, and helmet on the officer’s side of the truck in the tight, shadowy quarters up against the south wall of the apparatus bay when a woman in uniform edged around the front of Ladder 3.

“Cindy Rideout,” she said, sticking out her hand. “I’m here for my probationary truck work.”

We shook. Her grip was soft and damp. “This your first shift in the station?” I asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Mine too.” I smiled. Rideout was a Native American, five-eight or -nine, with black hair, eyes so dark they too looked black. She was pretty enough that the other guys in the barn were sneaking looks at her. “How long have you been in?”

“Almost four months, sir. I’ve been up at Thirteen’s.”

“Is that your permanent assignment?”

“It
was.
It looks like it might be up in the air now. Any special place you want me?”

Jeff Dolan, the driver, had just stepped up onto the running board alongside his seat and was making silly smiles at me across the engine compartment while pointing to a spot between us in the front where
nobody
ever rode.

“Ride behind me in the number three position,” I said.

After we signed into the daybook in the watch office, Rideout and I inventoried the compartments one by one. The barn was humid and filled with the sounds from Twenty-third Avenue. A passing bus. Squawking kids on their way to school.

In the six months since the Ocean Pride fire and Coburn’s funeral, I’d worked on all four shifts and in seven different stations, which had to be some sort of department record. I might have appealed for clemency to the chief of the department, but Hiram Smith, an alcoholic, was a man who surrounded himself with people whose job it was to keep him from looking inept, and it wasn’t his practice to contradict the orders of the men who were actually running the department. The odds of him interceding were almost nil. Besides, I didn’t want to give Hertlein the satisfaction of thinking he was anything but a tick on my thick hide.

And . . . I was beginning to grow fond of the notoriety.

There would be four of us riding Ladder 3. As lieutenant, I sat up front in the officer’s seat next to Jeff Dolan, the driver; Mike Pickett, a seven-year firefighter, and the probie, Cindy Rideout, would ride in the jump seats behind us.

Sharing the station with Ladder 3 were the firefighters assigned to the engine, known as Attack 6: Lieutenant Stephen Slaughter, Bill Gliniewicz, and Zeke Boles. Slaughter was their ramrod. He and I had a mixed history. Gliniewicz was the driver on Engine 6 and Boles the tailboard man.

Gliniewicz and I had worked together a time or two. He was one of those people who never met anybody he couldn’t say something bad about. All I knew about Boles was that he was rumored to be a crack addict and alcoholic. Slaughter had been my first officer in the department, which meant he’d taken up the approximate space in my life I would be taking up in Rideout’s. His father and grandfather had both been firefighters, and he was about as gung ho as you could get and not be in an institution. I was pretty sure he had an American flag stuffed up his ass and chewed red, white, and blue gum. On September 12, 2001, as a tribute to the firefighters who’d died the day before, he’d had the initials NYFD tattooed on his left forearm. It wasn’t until later that he learned New York’s Fire Department goes by the initials FDNY. Nobody laughed about it, though. At least not to his face.

He was a hard man and intimidated people, including any number of chiefs. For reasons I never understood, he had written negative and what I believed were biased reports on me for a good long while as my first officer.

After the housework was done, I called Rideout into my office. It was a tiny room with a bed in the corner—uncomfortably intimate, with the rain beating on the windows and the dark skies outside. Rideout was a high-breasted, long-legged woman with fine copper skin who made me nervous as hell.

I told her the same thing I told every recruit I worked with. I told her how to stay alive. I told her she could increase her odds by staying hydrated and keeping physically fit. I told her what I expected from her. She listened and seemed eager to learn. Her probation would last another eight months, and for the time being I would be writing daily and monthly reports on her. It was a task I took seriously. If I let somebody through who wasn’t right for the job, he or she might end up dead. I didn’t want that on my conscience. And I didn’t want me or anyone else to end up dead because of them either.

I told her what happened at the Mary Pang fire. What happened at the Leary Way fire. I told her about Coburn and the Ocean Pride fire last summer.

She held my look—confident, self-assured, without any real idea of what she was getting into. She had recently turned twenty-two.

“Any questions?” I asked when I was through.

“Sir? There’ve been some arsons in the past week. I’m just wondering . . .”

There had been half a dozen small fires in Station 6’s district, mostly late at night. So far nobody was overly concerned. “Don’t worry about it. We fight an arson fire just like we fight any other fire. We catch the guy. I break his neck. It’s that simple.” I grinned.

She laughed nervously.

“I just wonder about these arsons. What if it’s a terrorist?”

“If terrorists were setting fires, they’d do a better job than these piddly-ass calls. This is just some dingbat.”

At that moment Lieutenant Slaughter poked his head in my door, smiled warmly, and said, “Hey, cocksucker.”

“What’s up, gramps?”

“So you finally decided to come where the action is?” It wasn’t until he pushed the door open that Slaughter realized Rideout was in the room. “Sorry. I didn’t see you. Excuse my French. Paul and I go way back.”

“Steve was my first officer,” I said. “He tried to can me.”

“Bullshit. I was keeping you on your toes.”

Slaughter stepped into the room, making it even smaller, and we all three looked at one another for an uneasy moment. I had the feeling from a fleeting look I saw behind his heavy glasses that Slaughter thought there was something illegitimate about my closed-door meeting with Rideout. There’d been male officers in the past who’d harassed female recruits, and I knew of at least one woman who got her job by sleeping with an officer. There’d been women on the receiving end of bad reports who claimed the officers evaluating them tried to pressure them into having sex. These were by no means common problems, but we’d all heard the stories.

“You’ll both like this station,” Slaughter said. “We’re busy. We do our work, but we have a lot of fun too. We call it the God Bless America Firehouse and Lounge.”

Rideout laughed. I said, “We heard you’ve been having some arson fires.”

“Nuisance crap. It’s not like when Paul Keller was running around. Or the other one, the one we never caught.”

Slaughter was a big man, imposing, six feet, 250 pounds, with thick, black-framed glasses, a shock of brown hair, bushy eyebrows, and a walrus mustache he let creep over his lip. He was a firefighter’s firefighter and had the kind of face advertisers slapped on fire appliance calendars.

Before we could continue our conversation, the station alerter went off. At Six’s the engine got more calls than the truck, but this one was for us.

It was a water job.

3. FIRST SHIFT AT SIX’S

Cynthia Rideout

D
ECEMBER
5, T
HURSDAY
, 2331
HOURS

         
As far as I know, everybody else in the station is asleep. I can hear Zeke Boles snoring on the other side of the lockers. Poor Zeke. Slaughter and Gliniewicz had worked themselves into a lather by the time Zeke finally walked in at 0835, almost an hour late. Apparently this isn’t the first time they had to call Zeke at home.

After he got here, some chiefs from downtown showed up and they all went back in the engine office. He ended up working the shift and getting disciplinary charges for a failure to report. Zeke seems to be a gentle, kindhearted man. People say he has a drug problem, but I think they’re just saying that because he’s always late and he’s black.

When they all went into the office, Mike Pickett, my partner on Ladder 3, griped that we were going to catch some of their aid alarms because the engine wouldn’t be in service to take them. I never dreamed there were firemen who didn’t want alarms.

The unofficial department policy is that firefighters can go to bed after ten at night, but Jeff Dolan, our driver, was asleep by nine-thirty. He’s the hardest worker on the crew and pretty much does what he wants. Pickett was on the phone all evening, so I have no idea when he turned in. Pickett seems to be Ladder 3’s resident complainer. He and Bill Gliniewicz, the driver on Engine 6, bitch for hours on end.

I can’t sleep. I’m in the bunk room tucked up in the corner of my bunk against the wall. I can hear the wind in the bushes outside my window. It’s a cozy little walk-in cubicle about the size of a jail cell. I never would have thought a shift with no fires and only two alarms could wear me out, but being a probie is no picnic.

This morning when I got here at a quarter to seven, I ran into Katie Fryer in the beanery. I knew there were women working in the station, but I didn’t expect a giant. She’s six-three or -four, and I hate to think how much she weighs. After she left this morning, I heard a couple of men on our shift making jokes about her breasts. My guess is they’ve been making those same jokes the entire eight years she’s been here.

Katie has this affected way of speaking that almost makes her seem retarded. It’s tricky to describe. She reminds me of someone who’s been raised by very old grandparents and has adopted their speech patterns.

“Listen,” she whispered. “We’ve got fifteen minutes before the night watch opens that door, so I’m going to fill you in. This is a man’s world, but you can fit in if you take into account a few basics. The first thing you have to remember is you’re not a man. I know that sounds moronic, but we’ve had women here who thought they had to undress in front of men. Thought they had to curse like the men. Always keep your dignity. The second thing—they sent you down here to fire you.”

Her last statement shocked me. My first monthly report at the end of November hadn’t exactly been glowing, but nobody’d mentioned termination.

Now that I’ve been moved to Six’s, the December report is going to be written by Lieutenant Wollf, and I figured things would get better.

I stared into Katie Fryer’s eyes and said, “
Every
body in my class is doing three months on a truck company.”

“Listen, honey. Wollf never worked here before you showed up. They brought him in to terminate your sweet ass. That’s what he does. Wollf fired a woman recruit last year. They sent you here so he could fire you too.”

“But the union. The civil service regulations. They have to be fair.”

“That’s right. There are rules, and trust me when I tell you they know them a hell of a lot better than you do. You got a bad report from Galbraithe, right?”

“Those reports were supposed to be confidential.”

“Nothing’s confidential in the fire department. Last year one of the deputy chiefs went to bed with a secretary in the FMO. Wanna know what they had for breakfast? Honey, this is a fire department. It’s a gossip factory. I haven’t even come to Wollf yet. Paul Wollf is a bad-ass right out of . . . who was that bozo who wrote
The Three Musketeers
?”

“Alexandre Dumas.”

“Right. He’s right out of one of those comic books. You never met anybody like him. His father burned up in a house fire right here in our district. When Paul Wollf was a boot out at Thirteen’s, he saved three lives in a furniture warehouse factory. About the biggest hero we ever had. He beat up a chief last summer and got away scot-free. All you need to know is Wollf eats recruits raw and spits ’em out before breakfast. Hey, listen. I’m not telling you this to scare you. What you have to do here is go out and do the best job you’re capable of. That’s what’ll get you through. And remember. Don’t make excuses when you screw up. Somebody asks you to do something, do it. Pitch in whenever there’s
any
work to be done. Be aggressive at fires. Push people out of the way if you have to. I mean that. This is one place where polite’ll get you fired. They’re looking for aggression. People who can prove they’re not afraid of anything. Elbows and assholes.”

“But if this guy’s here to fire me, what chance do I have?”

“Like I said. The two things they’re worried about with women is strength and fear. Pretend you’re fearless even when you’re staring the Antichrist in the eye. Hey. That’s not bad. I think I’ll write that one down. And trust me, sweetie, that’s who you’ve got for a lieutenant—the Antichrist. You get in trouble, call me. Us girls have to back each other up.”

“Thanks, Katie.”

Despite what Fryer told me, everybody on C-shift treated me well all day, including Lieutenant Wollf. Then again, they treated me well up at Thirteen’s and that didn’t stop them from writing a nasty report on me.

Lieutenant Wollf has a direct quality, a way of staring at you with those blue eyes that’s almost like a movie star. I mean, he’s that self-assured. He’s not a pretty boy, but with that curly black hair and those eyes, he has some charm in spite of never showing his emotions. He’s six-four or -five and has a large, open face. You can tell exactly what he looked like as a little boy.

The lieutenant on the engine, Slaughter, has twenty-five years in the department, has been to all the big fires, and says things like, “He doesn’t show up in a few minutes, I’m going to my locker and get a can of whup-ass.”

Station 6 is a small cream-colored firehouse built around a double apparatus bay. On one side of the apparatus bay you have the watch office and the kitchen, which in the Seattle Fire Department they always call the beanery. There’s a chrome island with a gas range. Two refrigerators. A TV mounted on the wall.

Crammed into the apparatus bay behind the engine there’s a workbench area, the officers’ rest room, a storage room for our bunking boots, the two officers’ rooms, the hose tower, and a small inspection room with a computer, a printer, and file cabinets.

On the south side of the app bay is a long, narrow bunk room split up into little cubicles without doors. The bunks are separated by tall lockers. My bunk is directly across from the women’s head at the front of the station. Bill Gliniewicz is in the corner bunk next to the door to the apparatus bay. On the other side of me is Zeke Boles. He’s a whole chapter.

Downstairs is, believe it or not, a handball court. There’s a study room with a second computer, a laundry room, and a carpeted weight room with weight benches, dumbbells, exercise bikes, a StairMaster, you name it. I went down there this afternoon and found Lieutenant Wollf working out. The amount of weight he was bench-pressing was obscene.

We only had two alarms today: a water job this morning, where we used the water vacs to suck dry the carpets in an apartment house after a pipe broke, and an aid call this afternoon. Meanwhile, despite being out of service for a couple of hours this morning over the Zeke fiasco, the engine went out nine times, every one either an aid or a medic run. Gliniewicz tells me that’s a typical day around here.

Jeff Dolan and Mike Pickett like to say they’re saving the truck for the important stuff.