Burning Down the House Read online

  Jutting out from under my sweater, the object closest to the camera is my pager, a big rectangular Motorola that went everywhere with me. Every time the pager dug into me, every time I realized it was there, I would hope it was on the verge of going off. I’d already started doing the little planning flick in my head that would go on for years—deciding how I’d get to the fire station if the pager went off, how long it would take me, whether I’d be able to get there in time to catch the first truck before it rumbled away.

  I look posed, leaning against that wall, and I realize now that I look remarkably unprepared for anything. Smug, as if I was sure I already knew everything there was to know, a look that was at the same time betrayed by the soft, unformed edges of my face. A face still forming up, halfway to the face it would eventually be, but already holding hints of what might be strain.

  Back at the truck, the fire chief was blunt.

  “Noxzema job,” he said gruffly, meaning he’d swipe a finger into a blue bottle of Noxzema and fill both his nostrils before he got close to the body, in an effort to keep from being hit too hard by the stench of the early stages of putrefaction. It doesn’t take long in summer, not when it’s someone who’s been out in the weather for three days or so.

  Noxzema sounds like a practical-enough solution, but it is never really as easy as that; there’s no simple way to keep it all away, especially not that smell. The smell of death is something we all seem hard-wired to shy away from. If you smell it and have no idea what the stink is, you’ll still be overcome with the urge to stay away. It can overwhelm curiosity, and it’s a smell that clings, that sticks in your nose the way burnt cedar does, as if certain-shaped molecules find certain-shaped receptors and can’t seem to disengage.

  Then there’s “the body” itself. I learned to use general, less human terms, and even those words get updated, changing over time as people fight over what’s suitable. You can almost place a firefighter’s training in time by what words he uses. Once, the people injured at accidents were called “victims.” I still fall back on that one. Then they became “casualties,” because “victims” always sounded like whoever you were talking about was already dead. But what we really needed was a good, neutral description. It’s easier when the person is just “a body,” a simple thing like a couch or a table or a box spring, instead of “the baby” or “Elizabeth” or anything that makes you think of warm skin.

  It was a small clearing, hardly more than twenty feet square, a small notch in the forest sloped precipitously enough that, by sitting at the top edge, the spruce and pine below didn’t reach high enough to block my view of the valley. It was the kind of place you trip over sometimes by chance, far enough away from the path that you can imagine no one else has ever been there. The kind of place you might hold in your memory as a respite, as its own relaxation; the kind of place that, once found, you would go back to over and over again, either in person or in memory. The place you and a girlfriend would visit some afternoon and always remember. A postage stamp of the world that becomes your property by its mere discovery.

  She had a blanket and a knapsack—the remains of a picnic, an empty pop bottle and wrappers. A few stuffed animals, and her jacket, folded neatly in a square. Pill bottles. She had taken off her shoes— brown flat shoes, the leather in a woven waffle pattern across the toes.

  After we left, someone would have gathered up all the personal effects and litter, and in a week or so the grass would slowly have found its way back upright, looking as untrammelled as ever.

  FIVE

  One night in summer we were called out just after dark, and the trucks pulled up sharply next to a steel-girdered bridge across the Gaspereau. The cross-hatch of the girders against the sky was matte black set over the dark blue of the fading light, the way tree branches turn to two dimensions at dark, but the steel was far more ordered.

  The pattern of the metal became even more pronounced as the night blackened and the flicker of the red and white strobe lights played across it, flattening out the depth so that the individual beams held in the air like a flashing, heavy spiderweb. The Gaspereau River is, by then, close to the Bay of Fundy, much wider than even a few miles farther up, and the silty brown water flows in between deep, fleshy berms of soft, gooey red clay and mud.

  Step into that mud and you will sink in great sucking steps, up to the knee and beyond, and with every pulling step back out again you can feel your joints coming unhinged. The smell of the flats is rich and complicated, with a hint of sulphur left by the work of bivalves and mud worms and a hundred kinds of unseen creeping anaerobic life. It looks like a wasteland, but every square inch is packed with some kind of company, from shrimp-like copepods to flatworms so thin you can see their organs pulsing through their skin, to bacteria whose heat cooks the muck and makes it warm enough to steam all winter long, whenever the tide falls away.

  The bridge was high and painted the shallow flat green that the Nova Scotia government must have gotten cheap somewhere. It was only one lane, so that you often had to wait your turn. You didn’t so much drive across it as you aimed your car at the narrow gap and let your wheels do the rest of the work, trapped like a railcar on the tracks. It was the kind of bridge that woke up sleeping front-seat passengers simply by the abruptly altered sound of the tires on the bridge deck, the soft hiss of pavement changing to the angry buzz of the grated surface.

  On both sides the bridge approaches were hemmed in by fat galvanized steel guardrails, bolted onto rows of six-by-six posts so that, if you missed the approach to the bridge, you would still be shepherded onto it, instead of piling into the ironwork or flinging yourself up and over and into the river.

  Unless you hit the guardrail exactly right.

  Every time I went to an accident I would wonder why it was that so many people could hit things just exactly right—just exactly right to do the most possible damage. I spent years going to see the aftermath of the most amazing sets of chances, all running precisely true, the results then fixed as rigidly as if cast in amber.

  The car this time was a burgundy Cavalier, and the place where the guardrail edged down into the gravel was also the exact point where the car had angled away from the road, so that instead of stripping the paint off one side of the car and shrugging the vehicle back towards the pavement, the rail had instead launched the car almost directly into the air. When it was happening, it must have been something to see, I thought, looking down beside the river to where the car had landed square on its wheels in the mud, the front end already dipping into the water.

  I was still standing on the tailgate of the pumper, and my eyes could follow the beam of the spotlight that perched on the back corner of the truck. It’s the unexpected things that strike you the most—the missing things your mind still expects and somehow can’t work out when they’re not there. It took me a while, but I figured it out: what was missing were tire tracks. My brain expected a car to have made tracks in soft, wet mud. But that’s because my head didn’t expect cars to fly. This one had, and I can imagine it still, falling forward through the air for a few breath-holding seconds, like a big square cardboard shoebox, before landing hard twenty feet or so out and below the bridge.

  Inside the car had been two girls, neither of them much older than myself. One was unhurt, and the first firefighter who scrambled down through the mud brought her up on his back, a slow-motion piggyback through the mucky soup. When we had angled the lights down onto the roof, she had been sitting there, waving, having twisted her way out through the open side window.

  Her friend, the driver, hadn’t been able to get out; the landing had broken the car’s back and none of the doors would open. Besides, the driver hadn’t been wearing her seat belt. She hadn’t hit the windshield, but her stomach had fetched up on the steering wheel and the whole car had basically bent into her, the steering column pressing her back into her seat and pinning her in place. She was complaining about pain in her lower back, but she was lucky: sometimes
the outside ring of the steering wheel just breaks away and the solid metal post of the column goes right into the driver’s chest like a spear. Steering columns—they’re one of the toughest things to cut in a car. Made of hardened steel, you usually pull them back out of the way with a come-along winch and chains, or with the big power tools the media always call “the jaws of life” once you’ve taken the roof off the car.We cut steering columns only if we had to, and it was very, very slow work.

  The firefighters from my crew were moving around the car in slow motion, trying to decide if it was likely to slide the rest of the way into the water, knowing we’d be unable to stop it if it did.

  You’re supposed to stabilize a car before you begin working on it, so that it doesn’t start moving and injure someone else. Sandbags or wheel chocks work well on the road or on the shoulder, but there’s not much that works well in wet mud. There was nothing to attach the chains or the come-along to, only long, bright green sawgrass on the banks of the river, its roots set deep into the soft, wet mud sponge. No trees on the bank, just a farmer’s fence, the posts coloured a silvered grey that meant they’d either hardened off to an almost astounding toughness or else rotted away at ground level, held up by the taut barbed wire running around the flat river pasture. Still a new firefighter, I felt almost like a bystander—but more than that. It was as if a window was opening; I was realizing that even someone my age wasn’t immune, that wrong turns and loose gravel could happen to anyone at any time. That bad luck had a way of just waiting for people, and that even I might not be safe.

  The more experienced firefighters had a way of doing things at a scene as if they were following some kind of whispered instructions only they could hear, their ears on a different frequency than any I could tune into. I’d spent hours memorizing the contents of every compartment on every truck: which heavy door hid the saws, where the chimney-fire gear was kept. But the other firefighters all seemed to know much more than that—not only where things were, but also which ones would be needed, and in what order. Gear came out of the trucks and made its way down to a tarpaulin near the car, heavy equipment being laid out side by side in lines, like huge surgical tools on a dark blue plastic tray.

  Down in the mud, the firefighters were moving like astronauts, slowed by the viscous goo around their boots. They were bringing down the big power units and the cutters, were putting the heavy tools on the hood, getting ready to set out everything so that it would be close at hand when they started working. The tools caught in the bright lights, and the woman in the car started screaming.

  We put a blanket over people when we start to work; it keeps sharp scraps of metal away from them and catches the sprays of breaking glass when the windows are smashed out. I’ve held blankets in front of scores of victims, but I have a hard time believing I’d be able to stand it if someone did it for me. It’s not so much the claustrophobia as the feeling of having everything that’s going on kept away from you. Dentists keep their instrument trays out of sight for good reason, and firefighters often do too.

  The firefighters weren’t that far along yet; the blanket that would cover the victim was out of its plastic sleeve but still on the roof of the car. The cutters with their big bird-beak titanium jaws must have been threatening enough to the woman inside, lying the way they were, tilted to one side on the hood right in front of her.

  I didn’t get to see the actual rescue. I didn’t get to take part in it, either. It’s slow work, and they had other plans for me. Chief Wood arrived in his big dark blue Crown Victoria, the firelight circling slowly in the windshield. He grabbed me by one shoulder and turned me away from the wreck, so that all I could see was his outline in the bright glare of the car’s headlights.

  “You take her and get in the back of the rescue,” the chief said, gesturing to the front-seat passenger from the car. The firefighter who had brought her up from the car had gotten a blanket from the side bay of the rescue, and she was wearing it wrapped around her shoulders and hanging to her ankles like a long coat. She was standing looking down at the car, and she had her arms across her chest under the blanket, her chin and mouth tucked down into the dark grey folds of cloth.

  As it got darker, a night with no moon and out on a road past all street lights, the crash scene was coming into sharp relief. With all the lights shining down, it was like watching the little big top, a one-ring circus that was both awful and hard to take your eyes off, the performers all yellow-clad, reflective tape flashing when it hit the spotlights just right.

  I told the chief I hadn’t written the certification exam for first aid yet.

  “I don’t want you to do first aid,” he said gruffly. “I don’t want you to do anything. I just want you to talk to her.” He slammed the door of the rescue behind me after I clambered onto the long backbench seat in the truck.

  It was a strange place to be sitting, both of us with our backs up against the side doors. Normally it would be packed tight with three firefighters in full gear. Now the space seemed inexplicably large— perhaps because we were pointedly sitting as far away from each other as we could, as if even the chance that our bodies could touch in those circumstances was somehow wrong. The chief had reached in and turned the switch so that the inside of the truck was lit up by the dome light, and so that the windows turned halfway to mirrors against the dark of the night. I could see myself over her shoulder, looking over-large in my yellow jacket, and I could see my face, trying desperately to bend itself around small talk.

  “Out for the evening?” I tried. Where do you start? She had already been asked whether she was hurt, had already had another firefighter chat away at her while running a practised eye over everything from the way she moved to whether there was clear fluid in her ears, whether her pupils were the same size and reacting to light.

  If I were doing it now, after years of practice, I’d know how to cheat. I’d start by asking her first name and telling her mine, and I’d take off my helmet and the Nomex hood underneath. I’d know enough to leave my hair all distractingly spiky and messed up by static or sweat as the hood came off—anything to knock her out and away from the accident, to make a simple, distracting, human link. The technique is practised and deliberate, like so many other things, even though the idea is to make it seem as spontaneous as possible.

  “Will she be all right?” the woman asked, and then I realized that the chief had put me in the rig with her mostly because we were so close in age. She was wearing a dark sweater and her face was startlingly pale with the black glass behind her, red patches high on both her cheeks. Beautiful in the haunting way that young women often are, thin, fine lips and a narrow face that seemed to be drawn all out of vertical planes and lines. Light brown hair, straight on both sides of her face like a frame.

  “She’ll be fine,” I said as reassuringly as I could, even though I wasn’t sure.

  I was lucky that time—it turned out I was right. You learn eventually to take those questions sideways, so that you don’t actually give anyone anything to hang false hopes on. “They’re just taking their time, being careful,” is an easy answer, because it’s always both true and false. Regardless, they’d be careful—but that didn’t mean anything.

  I had trained on all the tools by then, knew their heft and how awkward many of them were to hold for any length of time, and I recognized the thudding, heavy beat of the compressor out there in the dark. I knew they would start by breaking out every single window in the car, and then they’d take the cutters and start on the doorposts. You train by labelling them A, B and C so you never forget which ones to cut first. Then they were going to pull the steering wheel back away from her, and it would make disturbingly loud screeches and moans, the occasional pistol-shot bang as some piece of metal reached its bursting point and failed all at once. Sometimes it happens so sharply that the vehicle shudders with the force and the sound startles everyone.

  The firefighters were going to violently destroy what was left of the car, cu
t it completely apart so that they could ease the half-backboard down between the girl and the seat, and then strap her tight in place before lifting her out. The chief had called for a second pumper, and I didn’t understand why until it rumbled up behind us and I heard the rattle of the come-along chains. They parked the pumper across the road and ran all the chain—and a length of the heavy rescue rope, too—out across the top of the marsh, managing to loop it around one back wheel of the car in the mud.

  The rope might not hold the full weight of the car—even a heavy kernmantle rope will stretch and snap under enough weight—but it was better than having the car start to move. I know now that the chief was counting the financial cost too: stretch rescue rope even once and it comes out of service and gets thrown away. It’s absolutely guaranteed to its certified weight—but only for the first use. Once the roof of the car was off, there would be as many as five firefighters inside the destroyed vehicle, and the chief decided not to take any chances.

  “She only just got it,” the woman said to me.

  “Got what?” I said, drawn back all at once from the sounds outside. “The car. Carla only just got the car. It’s used, but she just bought it.”

  From the river, down in the mud and the water and the big circular puddles of spotlight, there was suddenly screaming again.

  Loud.

  “Is she all right? Is she going to be all right?”

  I tried to judge from the screaming, a mug’s game because everyone is so different, tried to guess whether she had snapped out of the shock and was just frightened or actually in a lot of pain. I heard the compressor engage and knew the hydraulics were working, and that the cutters were taking their first clean bite through the car. But I couldn’t find a way to push out any words to answer her questions. My head was trying to find its way onto solid ground, and I was slipping in my own deep mud. I wanted her to refine the question, to ask her, “What’s ‘all right’? Alive? Walking? Spine-injured? Rehab?”