Read Online Burning Down the House by Russell Wangersky - Free Book Online Page B

the woman I was supposed to be keeping calm tried to get out of the rescue. When she pulled the handle open and started to push on the door, I reached across and grabbed her by the wrist, encircling her small arm as gently as I could, the tips of my thumb and index finger barely touching.
    That was all it took. I didn’t have to pull or really even hold her arm, just gently wrap my fingers around it, and she stopped moving as suddenly as if I had bound her in place, like a magic lasso. Like all she needed was the tiniest reason to stop, because while she felt drawn to the noise outside, really she didn’t want to see anything at all. As we sat there, frozen like that, I watched the emergency lights of first the ambulance, and then the police, and finally the wrecker, dance down the hill behind us in the big wing mirrors of the rescue, and neither of us spoke again.
    Her friend Carla, it turned out, had back injuries low down, and savagely torn muscles, the kind of constant pain that can wind up changing your life so that you can’t even remember what it was like when you used to wake up without hurting. Once they had her free, she screamed more when they put her on the backboard and then into the mesh Stokes basket, and even though they carried her up as evenly and steadily as they could, the firefighters kept slipping left and right in the mud, and she screamed with every small jolt all the way up the bank to the side of the road.
    I let go of Carla’s friend so that the police could talk to her in the back of their own car. They had come up to the window and knocked, and after I let her go I rode back to Wolfville on the same long bench seat where the chief had placed me, hemmed in on both sides by tired, dirty firefighters who smelled like wet brass and clamshells. Big firefighters who actually did something, who didn’t get sent just to sit in the rescue.
    Even though we hosed the gear down as soon as we got back to the station, the fine red and black silt of the mud had worked its way into the fabric of the other firefighters’ bunker pants, and they had that shadow—a carry-over of past circumstances, a little black cloud, a badge, a deep-seated messaging smudge—until we spent a Monday night training with firefighting foam, both the fluffy detergent foam and the heavier protein foam that smelled for all the world like hotdogs. After that, all our gear was clean for a while, as if our histories had been magically overwritten.
    By then I knew I was learning a secret alphabet, a different kind of code, a type of shorthand that passed for identification between firefighters, so you’d designate things as “the woman in the reservoir,” “the burning pig” or “the asphalt-truck crash.” It was a remarkably private language, something inside the firefighting fraternity and, most times, inside the particular department itself.
    The geography of firefighting is built on experience, and it’s built by every call. Windsor, I’d learn, was the town where the fire department had been called out to a propane explosion and found a house where all the sills were broken off, and two pies that had been cooling on a kitchen table had glued themselves to the ceiling, driven straight upwards by the force of the explosion. You tend to lay things out in your own distinct memory map; it’s a pattern of dots where things have happened, sometimes insignificant things— like the house I’ve always called the bacon-fire house because, every time the family cooked bacon, their smoke alarm went off and we would get sent to check it out. I’ve built my own mental pocket guide to two very different communities, including indelible marks that indicate where things went wrong—or, worse, the inevitables I tried to change and couldn’t. It’s all mine, my private complication— no two firefighters have been on the exact same pattern of calls, have been