Pyro (20 page)

46. SOLE SURVIVOR

Cynthia Rideout

D
ECEMBER 22
, S
UNDAY, 0219 HOURS

         
Tonight has been a little piece of hell. I’ll start at the beginning. We had two side-by-side houses on fire. The fire on the north house was mostly on the exterior. The fire in the south house, the house we tackled, started in the basement.

Our assignment was to go to the roof of the south house, cut a hole, and ventilate so the guys inside didn’t suffocate when they applied water. So they could see. So they wouldn’t get burned.

Wollf orders us to get the thirty-five, but when I go to the back of the rig, Towbridge has the twenty-five out. Easy to figure why. It’s lighter. In fact, it’s considered a one-man ladder, while the thirty-five requires at least two people to carry it. This is so like Towbridge, who, even around the station, is always trying to work some angle to make things easier.

“Wollf said the thirty-five,” I tell him.

“I know. It’s okay.”

So we carry the
twenty
-five down the street, over hose lines, past firefighters, up an embankment to the house, and then I see the look on Towbridge’s face when he realizes it isn’t going to reach.

Wollf sees our predicament and tells us to take the ladder around back where the roof might be lower. We find ourselves squeezing past these three old trucks in the driveway. It takes forever. At one point we set the ladder across the bed of a truck and walk around to the other side and pick it up again. Wollf has a spot picked out in the backyard. The ground is lumpy and dark, and we move cautiously.

Towbridge and I are both so winded we can hardly talk. Towbridge moves fast, but he pays for it. So do I when I’m working with him. We are both still trying to catch our breath when Dolan climbs the ladder.

We get our masks on, Towbridge looks at me, and we both know neither of us wants to go first. If you go second, you get that extra time to breathe. Carrying that ladder down the street and up into this backyard while wearing fifty pounds of equipment has winded us.

I’m the boot, so I start climbing.

I get to the flat part of the roof, turn around, and steady the ladder for Towbridge. He jumps to the second roof, while I’m forced to crawl onto it and to keep crawling until I get to the toeholds somebody cut with an axe.

We’re cutting the hole when the roof caves in.

Dolan and Towbridge disappear into the fire together.

I scream, but the noise is inside my mask and nobody hears me. Oh my God, I think. They’re dead. Or will be in a matter of seconds.

Then Wollf is leaning over trying to spot them and he has his head in the flames and I think he is going to die too. Which will leave me alone on the roof, the sole survivor of Ladder 3. I’ve never been more frightened in my life.

After a while Wollf reaches down into the smoke and hauls a bundle of yellow out like it’s a sack of dirty laundry. It’s Towbridge.

It’s a long time before we find out what happened to Dolan.

47. WE’VE LOST HIM

         
Below me is a caldron of flame and hot, boiling smoke. Every once in a while a haphazard tongue of flame forces me back. You feel the heat through your turnouts. We don’t have an inch of bare skin showing, but still, you feel it. We might as well be pigs on a spit.

I put my left leg into the hole we’ve cut, searching until I find a board strong enough to support some weight, then reach out and grab the pike pole, which is sticking straight up. I feel the heat crawling up my pant leg.

“Mayday!” I repeat on the radio. “Mayday!” No reply.

Rideout yells, “Dolan! Towbridge!”

And then, before I can lower myself into the fiery attic, a yellow helmet comes into view three feet from my face, a firefighter facing the other direction, blindly backing toward me.

I grab the shoulder strap on his backpack and yard him out of the hole backward. He is incredibly heavy, and thrashes about like a struggling swimmer. Rideout grabs one of his legs when he throws it up over the roof.

Towbridge.

Remarkably, his air is still working and he appears not to be too badly injured.

I grab the pike pole and begin poking around in the smoke at the point where I’d last seen Dolan. Jabbing the pole anywhere he might have fallen, or rolled, or crawled. Or died. Prodding for anything soft.

A hose stream comes out of the smoke and smacks me in the face, hard, almost knocks me off the roof. A moment later it shoots straight up into the night sky. Then it is gone and we can hear it drumming on wood and plaster inside the house. Another stream shoots up into the sky.

“Where’s Jeff?” I ask Towbridge.

“I don’t know. Man, what happened? One minute we’re here and the next minute everything is black and it’s hotter than shit.”

“You were in the attic. Lucky you didn’t go through,” says Rideout.

“I musta landed on the planks. It was weird. I was just walking around down there.”

“Jeff?” I call. “Jeff?”

“Hey, Dolan. Hey, buddy,” yells Towbridge. “Come on outta there.”

I keep probing the darkness with the pike pole. The smoke turns to steam as the engine crew below us gets more water on the fire. Towbridge takes the pole and, braced by Rideout, fishes around in the hole. One of his gloves is missing. I drop down chest-deep in the cavern and begin walking around, holding on to the edges of the hole, feeling tentatively with my boots.

As we search, another truck crew arrives on the roof from the front of the house. Their weight, the four of them, over half a ton of men and equipment, begins sagging the roof even more. I am afraid Dolan is under them. That they are crushing him. I say as much. They back off.

When I see flashlights and firefighters below on the second floor, I ask them to pass up a hose line, which they do. It is hot and damp in the attic space, but I feel relatively confident in my footing. It is so hot I might as well be putting my head into a chimney. I pull up twenty feet of hose and begin hitting the remaining hot spots in the attic. My greatest fear is that he is burning to death while we are farting around.

Rideout says, “Oh God. We’ve lost Jeff.”

I am sick to my stomach, straining to peer through the smoke around me.

I pour water into every nook and cranny of the attic, into all the closed spaces under the collapsed roof. I still can’t find Dolan.

Then I get an idea. I shout down to the firefighters who handed up the hose line.

“Did somebody fall through there?”

“What?” A firefighter below is craning up at me.

“Did somebody fall through here?”

He steps back and shines his flashlight on a crumpled firefighter on the floor sitting amidst a pile of burned plasterboard. It is my driver, Jeff Dolan. He’s passed straight through the attic to the second floor and landed only a few feet in front of the hose crew.

“You okay?” I shout.

“I guess so.”

“Are you okay?”

“I broke my leg. Do you have the chain saw?”

“I don’t know where it is.”

“Don’t lose that saw.”

“Why? You want me to cut your leg off?”

He laughs through the pain. “No. I don’t want to have to explain to Stan down at the commissary how we lost it.”

“You just worry about your leg.”

Moments later as they begin to move him, he hollers.

“Remember you’re carrying a hero,” Towbridge shouts from above. “Don’t be messing with no hero.”

48. SHOOTING CHIEFS OUT OF CANNONS

Cynthia Rideout

D
ECEMBER 22,
S
UNDAY, 0340 HOURS

         
Whining like a baby the whole while, Dolan got patched up by the medics. Wollf, myself, and Towbridge stood at the back of the medic unit, the doors open. The medics cut most of Dolan’s clothing off. Towbridge and Wollf made it harder for Dolan the way only men can make it harder for each other.

“Jesus,” Wollf said. “Don’t you ever clean your toenails?”

“I clean ’em every morning right before I leave for the station. Then I come to work and have to wade through all the bullshit. That’s bullshit. Smell it.”

“No, thank you,” Wollf said.

“He’s hurtin’ pretty bad if he thinks somebody’s gonna smell his toes,” Towbridge said, laughing. Towbridge had minor burns on both wrists. Not enough to get laid off, but enough to ride up to the hospital with Dolan. How he got out of that attic without getting fried is something none of us have figured out. We came so close to losing two people.

Jeff’s leg is going to keep him out for at least six weeks.

There’s more. Katie Fryer made a rescue! Go, Katie.

She was working a trade on E-13, and they were sent to the second house, where they found two drunk civilians. The man managed to get out on his own, but the woman collapsed inside the front door.

Katie Fryer and one of the regulars from Thirteen’s kicked open the front door, and Katie dragged the woman out.

Later, the news crew from CBS showed up and began interviewing her, lights, camera, action. The civilian she rescued was on the heavy side, and during the interview Katie made the mistake of saying it was a good thing she’d been only a few feet inside the front door, because they couldn’t have dragged her much farther.

Eddings, who had been watching, called a halt to the interview and placed Fryer inside her Battalion 5 vehicle, where she began chewing her out for admitting she wasn’t strong enough to make a rescue. Eddings told her it was not only bad PR, but it was plain stupid. More than anything, Katie hates being told she’s stupid.

After the fire, the whole top of the house to the south looked like a collapsed angel food cake. Wollf and I went inside. Upstairs we talked to one of the guys on Ladder 7, who said, “It was a miracle you guys didn’t fall through sooner. Somebody sawed through the rafters in the roof.”

“The roof was booby-trapped?” Wollf asked.

“Sure looks that way,” said Fendercott, the Ladder 7 lieutenant.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Wollf so mad. Everybody was backing away from him.

We went downstairs, walked through both floors and then the basement, tracing the evolution of the fire.

We found the fire investigators, Connor and LaSalle, poking through the basement, where the fire had been set. From there it spread up to the first floor, then to the second story, where most of the heat had been trapped until we popped the roof.

Three hose crews had gone inside. It was the crew from Engine 10 who ended up taking the worst beating. “Jesus,” one of them said later. “As soon as he fell through the ceiling, we could feel the relief.”

Wollf laughed. “Maybe we should do all our ventilation that way. We could mount a cannon on the rig. Shoot firefighters through the roof from down the block. We’ll shoot chiefs first.”

Outside, Wollf and I took off our face pieces.

I followed him around the house and found him staring at a can of Shasta soda on the back porch next door.

“Stay here,” he said. “Make sure nobody touches this can. Marshal Five is going to want prints.” You could see he was still pissed about the roof. I was too, but not like him.

Somebody tried to kill our crew.

Before long everybody on the fire ground was talking about it.

Marsha Connor came over while Wollf was gone. “Hey. I heard you guys had some excitement.”

“A little.”

“These fires are giving them fits downtown. Last night there were twelve arsons. Tonight we’ve got four to look at. Everybody’s working overtime. It’s a mess.”

It’s a shame so many people pick on Marsha. She’s one of the nicest people in the department. True, she isn’t in such great physical condition; in fact, God only knows how she dragged herself through drill school. But she treats everybody with the same respect she needs so desperately and almost never receives. LaSalle is especially rough on her, making monkey faces behind her back, belittling her to her face. Sometimes I want to slap him.

“No Shasta products in either house,” Wollf said, returning. “I saw the owner in front, and he said all they drink is Schlitz and Michelob Light.”

“You better leave the interviews to us,” LaSalle said, coming out of the house next door.

“Yes, sir,” mocked Wollf.

I had to turn around real fast so LaSalle wouldn’t see me laughing.

It was three in the morning. Our fires had generated a fair-sized crowd, neighbors, looky-loos from other parts of town, local news network cameramen and commentators. Down the street, the CBS guys were interviewing Katie Fryer again.

While we stood in the street waiting for orders, Wollf looked past my shoulder and shouted, “Hey, you!”

He was looking at a cluster of six or eight women, one in a belted tan raincoat, a redhead.

Suddenly the redhead took off running.

Wollf blew through the onlookers and chased her along the side of the house across the street and into a backyard. He was still wearing his mask and all of his gear.

As she ran around the corner of the house, he pitched a ten-foot pike pole at her, threw it like a javelin, as if he wanted to kill her.

It almost did—kill her—it sailed through the folds of her raincoat and penetrated the sod.

Half a minute later the redhead raced out from between some houses down the street and turned south on the sidewalk. Wollf came out too, having dropped his MSA bottle and backpack somewhere in the darkness. He still had the pike pole, though.

All the firefighters in the street watched in astonishment. Nobody tried to stop him.

Wollf wasn’t somebody you tried to stop.