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The thing Bob thinks about scar tissue - the thing of it is, he knows, scars, scars don't feel pain. Scars are islands, like, oases, dotting tender planes of flesh, fluid, flawless, free. Rivers, undulations, or binding ropes, thick against joints that ache, the strive, that strain, that burn.
He saw a man burn up with phosphorus once. Could not do nothing but watch. Saw a man burn up with phosphorus screaming, screaming. Threw an asbestos blanket on him like to cover his shame as much as anything. That had been in the early days he was a fireman, and he did not remember the man's name, and sometimes he wakes at night wishing he could. Joseph, perhaps, or John, or Michael. The name would be good, and practical, and sturdy, as a house on strong foundations. No such thing as a house that did not burn - everything burned, given time, given the right fuel, the right temperature, the right conditions of avarice, or ignorance, or malice.
One night a child, a little boy hardly old enough to tie his own shoes yet, burned himself right up in a fire that he had set. He had not been on shift that night, but read about it in the paper later, and heard, too, the susurrus of rumor through the department - as a changing wind in tall grass - and he knew that it had been a lineman named Danny Cormier who had found the body, such was left of it, such a fragile scene, such that too strong a breath would teeter on those birdish, clenched bones and shatter them. The papers scorned the little boy's foster mother, his therapist, the children's services people, for too little.
Once upon a time when he was new, yet, and shaken from the phosphorus, the bright enlightened whitened screaming, he doused his fear and draped himself in laundered, pressed, niagara-sized and brand new uniform, and spoke earnestly to a classroom of boys and girls about how you must not play with matches, and you must not play near fire, and he had them recite like a catechism the telephone number for the fire department. And when he leaned near to a little girl who beckoned him she looked at him with wide, deep-set, unflinching eyes and said softly you smell like smoke.
Jack Hawley, who was in the paramedic class with him, had been a smoke-eater of the old guard, but he was smart, and he was crafty, and when he showered he would stand boldly under the spray, and dare anyone to stare, for he had a scar that rumbled and tumbled from his neck, to his shoulder, down his back and curved about his hip, and it was broad, and it was tough, and he did not speak of it to anyone for he, too, was brought, and tough, and rumbled and tumbled and grew a handlebar mustache and a wicked smile to draw attention away from the thing, which had happened, and was now writ forever on his body. The pain he would have been in. Bob had seen the new burn unit at Sherman Oaks where daily, they drew baths, and daily, they sloughed eschar from the wounds, until they were raw, and bled, and then they were laced in graft and dressed in sterile white, like acolytes, beginning anew. Some howled and sobbed and some lay still, lost, in the foreign desert of pain, and some died of it, their bodies rejecting wholeness and lapsing into infection, sepsis. He had read the greatest danger was fluid loss - as if the whole body itself wept at its injury, leaving behind the salt of its tears, crystalline. Like ash. Quick to scatter.
Bob has nightmares sometimes about burning to death but he thinks probably everyone does.
Bobby Amato, at 111, said that he had read in a book that everybody has three fears and they are drowning, burning, and darkness. And Ray Lansing, stirring too much sugar into his black coffee, cracked wise that Bobby Amato had ever read a book in his life and everyone laughed and Bob thought about it for a while.
Drowning. Burning. Darkness.
He has an argument with Craig Brice. His partner. They argue over the keys, and locking the cabinets. He has tried a cabinet once too many times and damn near broke his wrist. So he says to Craig Brice you're gonna lock those things next time you by god had better have one foot out the squad before I hit the brakes. When the tones drop they are still buzzing, not talking much, and he drives the squad with a lead dollop of anger in his belly, swinging too wide or too narrow on turns, braking just-too hard. As if to spite him, nimbly, Craig almost does have one foot to the ground before the squad stops, the door opening, dropping his glasses on the dash with less care than usual. Bob might have noticed that. He might have. But Craig is busy unlocking the cabinets. Bob is too busy with his SCBA. Their engine crew is laying hose like thread in the labyrinth and the monster, a slab-sided brick and concrete warehouse, is smoldering ahead. An awful mess of conjoined rooms, pipes, conveyor belts, offices. Men in shirtsleeves and ties are frantic; women in smart dresses with pencils behind their ears are trembling, cordoned off away from the building.
Cap sends them in a sweep. The warehouse, power cut, goes quickly from dim to dark, and the modern exit signs are faint and laughable ghosts in the haze. No one ever seems to know who works in these places, no one ever seems to remember which face is missing. So into every room they go. The lead in his belly melts into purpose. Door by door. The smoke is thicker. The clock is ticking. The day is still low and cool and they have by fifteens - twenty on the tank, but you need a buffer. Fifteens in and then back out. Don't push time. Fifteens in, the clock is ticking, every breath. In, and out. The air around him, and in his lungs, grows hotter. The halls are darker.
Time. When he turns, to follow the line, he thinks his partner must be with him.
The tank is heavy, and his gear is wet from inside. It is hotter, and somehow darker. He follows the line, to a sign, glowing like an ember above a doorway. His partner must be with him but when he comes out, into the rising day, the soot-dusted face beside him is broad and tall, a lineman from 18s whose name he does not know. He takes a breath to ask, where -
Where.
Something in the warehouse seems to burst, and the day becomes the dusk again, the sun backhanded with smoke, and ash, and wicked licks of wicked flame. Where -
Where did he go.
He is grabbing, like to break his wrist, the collar of the man - a young man, a soft face, a scant lace of mustache - where's my partner? Where the hell is he?
Time. He has no time. Cap is at his elbow saying Bob lay off, Bob, what's the matter and he says, his heart beating like a mad bird inside his ribs, the air hot in his lungs, I lost him.
Let go, he says, let go I gotta find him -
His tank is done. There is no time. The sky boils overhead. Someone says the south face of the building has collapsed. The men in shirtsleeves have loosened their ties, and the women in their smart dresses are crying, their mascara running into the soot that dusts their perfect cheeks, and they all cling to each other, far from the hot zone, like penned animals.
Someone is shouting for a medic. It is a kid he knows, another kid from 18s, Billy DeAngelis, who had said he wanted to be a paramedic too, if he could be. They had been at Rampart, and Craig had been checking the box, again, and Bob had been letting him do it, and they had taken up most of Dixie McCall's nursing station to do it, and Billy had been asking questions real questions.
So Billy DeAngelis is calling for a medic, and he is going to break his damn back, dragging along another man like that, dragging him like you drag the hook from a fish that has, hopelessly, swallowed it. You want it to live but you know it won't.
Craig is breathing. He is breathing and that's what matters. An ambulance is coming and the clock starts again, somewhere, and there is oxygen, and Billy DeAngelis is relaying everything he says on the biophone and maybe he will be a medic, crisp as a two dollar bill and trembling in the hot wind from the fire. Craig is breathing, he has an airway, he has a neb, he has a line, he has LR going in TKO, he is breathing, though he squints nearsightedly, his eyes red-rimmed, his face seeming young.
Cap doesn't want him to go in with him. Bob can see that on his face and in the tightness of his lips. He goes anyway. He's got to. Cap slaps him on the shoulder and says alright but you get your ass back here as soon as you can, the building's still on fire yannow.
Billy drives the squad in. He will drive them back. Bob leaves his partner in good clean hands. He does not want to. He leaves a handprint on the treatment room door, a parting gift to Kel Brackett, who tells him firmly that he is one big walking pile of hazardous material and could he get out before he contaminates the whole room and Dixie, ever the ambassador, tells him that they will get word to him with any changes. She promises this. Dixie does not make promises that she cannot keep.
Billy is waiting. Craig's glasses are on the dash. They have slid far toward the windshield but they are unharmed, unsmudged even, the metal rims glinting in the sun. The day is insultingly bright, the temperature tender for this time of year, the air dry and already whispering promises of drought in the hills. By the end of the day, half the warehouse will be gone, and a representative from the company will be scrambling an apology for keeping sloppy records of what, exactly, they had in storage. Four of their people are on burn units across the country. Three have smoke inhalation. One is dead.
He will drop by his partner's hospital room later. He will hear him wheezing from across the room, over the sound of his nebulizer running. He will come in and he will sit by him and he will say I've got your car keys.
I stripped your bunk.
I hung your shirts up but I didn't know the combination to your locker.
I got your glasses for you.