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bring in a crew that could do the job, but once he got there, he decided
you would be first.
 He s an asshole, Tronstad muttered.
I was a fuckup? Sure, I d made some mistakes, a few more when
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Abbott or Sears happened to be watching, but they made me nervous and
I was new.
 You thought that dickhead was your friend? Tronstad said.  I can
see now we weren t doing you any favors holding this back. You want to
know what he said about you? He was asking if we knew anybody who
wanted your spot after he bumped you to another station. Isn t that right,
Robert?
 He mentioned it a couple of times.
None of this was fair. I hadn t stolen anything. I wasn t a thief. I hadn t
bought a new car, nor had I made plans to move to Rio de Janeiro and
take a string of mistresses. At least now I knew, perhaps, the reason Sears
had turned against me so quickly: it wasn t a novel posture he d adopted
today, but rather an attitude he d been entertaining and concealing from
me for months. All along I thought Sears had favored me above the oth-
ers. When he approached a few minutes later, I was still stunned by the
revelations.
 Come on, guys, Sears said, happily.  I got us an assignment. Get up,
Gum. You can sit on your butt some other time.
 We re not due up, Tronstad said.  Some crews here have been wait-
ing half an hour.
 I jumped the line. Sue me. Sears walked ahead of us, carrying his
portable radio in one hand, a six-volt battle lantern in the other.
 What re you going to do? Johnson asked Tronstad.
 Fuck if I know.
 You re not going to do anything, I said.  I ll be watching.
Wearing our MSA bottles and backpacks, the three of us headed
toward the fire building, Sears marching in front like a duck leading his
sullen brood.
20. HEY, LADY, QUIT SMOOCHING ON THAT OLD FART
THE FIRE BUILDINGS sat between Aurora Avenue and Dexter Ave-
W
nue, both arterials. Another arterial, Mercer, ran along the south side,
near the fire complex, and it was on this road that a task force of six en-
gines from regional fire districts south of Seattle was waiting in a long
line, black smoke smothering their vehicles and personnel. I couldn t
think of a worse place to post them.
Knowing this was the last night I would wear turnout gear or be part
of this army of hose jockeys, I tried to hardwire it all into my memory,
soaking in the ethos, color, and sensibility of my firefighting life. After two
years I was only just getting used to all this, and tomorrow it would be
gone.
I felt a wave of melancholy over the fact that I d let my mother down.
Just as surely as she d devoted her life to making certain I got a solid foun-
dation, I d devoted the past month to bankrupting her efforts. Worst of
all, her last days would dwindle away in isolation.
City Light workers had killed the power to the fire building and the
nearby streetlights, but on Dexter the flames along the face of the build-
ing provided so much light that a hundred feet away you could read a
newspaper by it. I counted six teams of firefighters spaced on the street
outside the building wall, most of them holding down two-and-a-half-
inch hose lines or hunkered on monitors. The two-and-a-half-inch noz-
zles dispensed three hundred gallons per minute, the monitors eight
hundred gallons per minute, and the back pressure from these appliances
was such that at least one firefighter, and sometimes two, had to babysit
them to keep them from kicking back or sliding around.
At the far corner of the building, firefighters had strung lines out of
every conceivable port on two pumpers, until the hose in the street
looked like a plate of spaghetti. There were spots in the roadway where
136 E A R L E ME R S ON
the layers of cylindrical hose were two or three feet deep, where you had
to step over the hardened hose the way you stepped over a fence, and
where water got trapped inside the twisted stacks and formed pools a
child could dog-paddle in.
In the dark along the south side of the building, a crew from Engine 6
dragged hose to a point at the southeast corner of the fire building, where
they d been told to set up a monitor for us. Sears informed us we were to
man this monitor as soon as Engine 6 got water to it.
Johnson and I dragged hose while Tronstad traipsed alongside grip-
ing, occasionally filming us with the small video camera he sometimes
carried. It was vintage Tronstad: all mouth, no work.  Jesus. Why don t
they man it? [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]