Pyro (10 page)

23. PICKETT GETS BURNED AND I DIDN’T DO IT—HONEST

Cynthia Rideout

D
ECEMBER 9
, M
ONDAY, 0935 HOURS

         
I just got home from visiting Pickett at Harborview Hospital, and I feel so bad about the whole thing. Roper is on my lap purring away. He’s about the only consolation I have right now.

I barely had my bottle on when Dolan drove to Twelfth and East Fir and realized the dispatcher had given us the wrong intersection. Dolan didn’t even slow down on Twelfth, just kept rolling up the hill as Wollf said something on the rig radio about a corrected location.

It happened that fast.

When a ladder truck is first in, there’s not a whole lot they can do. After all, we don’t carry any hoses or water, just the ladders and all that equipment.

The fire was in a three-story apartment building on the northeast corner of a quiet intersection. Lots of potential for fatalities. All kinds of people yelling and screaming for us to do something.

A ton of smoke. No flame that we could see.

It was our second fire in ten minutes, and I don’t mind telling you it shook me up.

There were a million things to do and only four of us. Three, really. Because Lieutenant Wollf was the incident commander for the first few minutes.

We could hear sirens in the distance, but nobody else was there yet.

So picture this.

We get to the intersection and we see a three-story apartment building with a brick facade, built in a simple rectangle running lengthwise to the east with a flat roof and no protrusions. All the windows are flat against the walls. In the center of the wall facing us is an open stairway with balconies. On either side of the stairway are apartments, nobody in any of the windows.

There’s smoke coming from under the eaves. The central open stairwell and landings are obscured by smoke.

Which apartments are burning—no one can say.

To make matters worse, there are two men in their underwear on the third-floor landing. One man is putting his bare foot up on the railing as if he’s going to do a header onto the sidewalk.

“Get a ladder,” Wollf said. “Be careful they don’t jump onto it before you get the dogs locked. Talk to them. Communicate.”

I say, “Yes, sir.” Maybe I don’t really say it. Anyway, I am thinking the words. Here’s the bad part. When I turn around, Towbridge is gone.

Dolan is putting the aerial to the roof, so he’s not going to help.

A civilian standing nearby says, “Can I assist?”

“Yeah. Follow me.”

We go to the ladder compartment at the back of the rig and he helps me pull the twenty-five-foot ladder out and we start toward the stairwell with it, and when we get maybe twenty or thirty feet from the rig I hear Dolan yelling at me. “Not that one. Get the thirty-five.”

So we lay the twenty-five across the sidewalk and go back to the apparatus for a thirty-five. By now at least one other rig has shown up, Engine 25. When I look inside the ladder compartment, the thirty-five is not there.

When the civilian and I put up the ladder we dropped, I know two things:

(1) This ladder isn’t going to reach the third-floor balcony.

(2) The people on the balcony are gone. They’ve come down the stairs on their own and are standing next to us looking up as if there are other people up there, which there aren’t.

We still can’t tell which apartment unit is involved.

Then somebody with an Engine 25 badge on his helmet shows up in front of me and says, “Which floor?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I answer. He gives me a disgusted look. Like
he
knows.

Behind us I hear the roar of the motor on Ladder 3 as Dolan puts down the outriggers and prepares to raise the aerial. A hose line begins to fill at my feet with the usual sound of empty cardboard boxes getting kicked, and more people from Engine 25 show up. Somebody is beating in a door on the first floor. Boom. Boom. Two half-dressed male civilians are screaming at the firefighters that the fire is in their unit on the top floor.

I turn around to get directions from Wollf, but he’s busy talking to the officer from Engine 25. Pickett appears in front of me.

Pickett is a Ladder 3 man, but today he’s been detailed to Engine 10.

“Come on, kid. We’ll do some search and rescue. There’s probably people in those units.”

Since I can’t find my partner, Towbridge, I go with Pickett to the fan compartment and help him carry one of our power fans. We head up to the second floor with it.

This is a mess, I think. My partner is supposed to be Towbridge, but I haven’t seen him since we got here. You never lose track of your partner. I am thinking of all the ways I can get into trouble for this.

It’s a catfight climbing over all the firefighters from Engine 25, as they pull hose lines around their feet and break into the first-floor apartments. These firefighters are all so big with their bottles and bunkers on, we can’t get past them. Finally Pickett starts shoving people out of the way and we manage to get the fan up the stairs.

On two, I fire up the fan while Pickett kicks in the door to the apartment on the west side. Unlike the doors downstairs, this one bursts open at once. The apartment is clear. Pickett looks at me.

It’s my turn to kick in a door. It takes me four tries and I tweak my ankle doing it, but I say nothing. Pickett gives me advice, but the fan is making so much noise I can’t understand what he’s said. The door shudders open.

The unit is filled with black smoke. We’ve found the fire.

Pickett pulls the door closed to keep fresh air from feeding the fire and gets on his radio to tell everybody what we’ve found. Just as we get covered, two guys from Engine 25 come up the stairs dragging a hose line.

Pickett tells them, “This is the unit. We’re going in to search.”

Meanwhile, more firefighters are trying to push their way onto the landing. There are five of us on the cramped landing, plus the fan.

It has become so crowded I can barely move.

Pickett taps me on the shoulder, opens the door, and crawls in.

I crawl in behind him.

It’s dark and hot. Then, more quickly than I have ever seen it happen, the bubble of clean air from the noisy fan gets in front of us, and all of a sudden we’re standing up and walking around, and it’s like there isn’t even a fire. It’s like we’re just walking into this apartment in the middle of the night, looking for the owners. Looking for kids. The noise from the fan behind us sounding like a small airplane.

I remember we need to find an exit hole for all the air that’s coming in. We can’t just blow fresh air into a box or it will blow heat back out past us. We need an exit hole.

We search the small living room, then move into the kitchen. I find a window over the sink, try to open it, then break it out with my axe. Something is wrong.

Very quickly it begins to grow hotter.

It gets hotter and smokier. Now we are on our hands and knees.

I can hear men talking. It seems like their voices should be straight ahead, but they’re to our left. I don’t hear any hose lines being operated.

We move into an interior hallway. The bedrooms are down here, I am thinking.

Pickett stops dead. We’ve been moving along pretty smartly until now, but he doesn’t budge for the longest time. I get closer, but it is too hot.

Pickett’s face is in the carpet.

And then he is backing up over me, and I tell him to take it easy, but before I can even finish saying it, he’s crawled over me. I don’t know what’s going on.

Has he found a victim? Is he carrying a child?

He stands up and bumps into a wall hard. I pile into him. “What’s going on?” I say. “Where are we going?”

He doesn’t reply. He just gets low again. The atmosphere at head height is like a firebox.

I’m thinking he panicked. He panicked and is running out of the building. I’ve seen it happen one other time. In drill school a recruit threw the hose line down and ran out of the building—then got fired for it.

We’re crawling over a coffee table, and I’m trying to figure out how it suddenly got so hot in here and why Pickett is taking us in the wrong direction, because the closer we get to the doorway, the closer we should be getting to the fan, yet the noise of the fan is not in front of us. And then a group of firefighters are butting heads with us, crawling smack into us, and I realize we
are
in the doorway.

By the time I get my bearings, Pickett is gone. I step outside and see him vanish down the stairwell, crashing into firefighters who are coming up. One of them looks at Pickett and steps back, as if frightened by what he’s seen.

I follow him into the street, past the twenty-five-foot ladder we put up earlier, past Chief Eddings, who is screaming at someone. I mean
screaming,
“Get your fucking ass over there!”

She looks right at me but doesn’t see me. This really is the first time I’ve been to a fire with Eddings, and it’s a whole new side of her. My God, she’s frightened half to death.

Pickett hasn’t taken his face piece off yet. I am surprised when he zeroes in on a paramedic standing across the street from the fire building. A short, gray-haired man.

The medic gets an alarmed look in his eyes and starts helping Pickett with his helmet and face piece. Pickett’s been burned. I can see the marks on his face, blistered and black, like dirty bandages where his face piece wasn’t protecting him, burns laid out in patches with straight margins; one edge where his face piece didn’t cover him, the other where his collar came up and protected him.

It didn’t seem that hot.
I’m
not burned.

The second medic springs into action and they put Pickett on the gurney, handing me his equipment piece by piece as they strip him, telling me the department will want to take pictures of the gear.

Half a minute later Chief Eddings is crowding me in the doorway of the medic unit. “What’s going on here? What the hell is going on?”

“Just treating our patient,” says one of the medics, without looking up from her work. Pickett is joking with them, although you can tell he is in pain.

“Why didn’t somebody tell me about this? Jesus. Rideout! Is this your doing?”

“Chief, we were up there, and all of a sudden he had to come out.”

“Why didn’t somebody tell me?”

I don’t know what to say. Finally Pickett says, “Chief? Why don’t you blow it out your ass?”

Over the airwaves we hear Engine 25 announce they have the fire knocked down and are checking for extension. Finally the female medic says, “Chief. He’s got drugs on board. He’s not responsible for what he’s saying.”

“I’m not?” Pickett smirks. “Good. Chief. Why don’t you retire and make room for somebody who knows what the fuck they’re doing, somebody who cares about the people they work with, which you sure don’t?”

Pretending she hasn’t heard him, Eddings gets on the air and yells at the dispatcher who asked her whether she received the report that Engine 25 had knocked down the fire. “Of course I received the report. What do you think I’m doing here?”

After that she began barking orders at various crews. She hollered at Connor and LaSalle, the Marshal 5 investigators. She called LaSalle a “fuckin’ idiot.” Got into a shouting match with Battalion 6.

Later, I was in rehab in my damp T-shirt, halfway between feverish and shivering, drinking Gatorade and munching chocolate chip cookies the fire buffs had provided, when I saw Eddings staring at me from across the yard. For some reason her look reminded me of the time up at Station 13 when she came into the bunk room after lights out, ostensibly to ask me when I wanted to schedule my upcoming holiday. It had been dark and she sat on my bunk, and before I knew it she had her hand on my thigh, was slowly rubbing my leg and hip. I asked her to stop. At first she pleaded ignorance. “Stop what?” she said. When I picked up her hand and removed it from the blanket, she said, “Oh, that. Don’t mind that. It’s just us girls here. I do that unconsciously. It don’t mean nothing.”

But there had been no mistaking the meaning—not then or the second time it happened before I was transferred to Station 6.

Towbridge, who was sitting on the grass next to me in rehab, noticed Eddings staring in our direction. He chuckled and said, “She ain’t always like this at fires.”

“She isn’t?”

“Nah, she gets worse.”

This morning when we visited Pickett in the hospital, Towbridge got him laughing so ferociously they threw us out.

Wollf and I had already retraced our path inside the apartment. We knew, because I was behind him, that I had probably taken a great deal less heat than Pickett. It was hard to imagine it had been
that
much less, but hey—Pickett was burned. I was not.

“ ’Sides,” added Towbridge. “Everybody knows Pickett never goes into a fire without getting hurt.”

Dolan looked at me. “It’s true. He falls off a ladder. Something hits him in the head. Every time we get a fire call, he starts planning what he’s going to do on his time off. You heard him. He’s going to work on his boat.”

None of this made me feel any better.