The Arsons of Desire

One Begins in familiar ways: a Civil Service test, a training school and, later, the excitement of one's first fires and the fancy of wearing the uniform and helmet. I began this way, becoming a fireman, setting out to serve the citizens while serving myself some needed solitude; but lately, I'm ambushed with dreams and visions. This sort: I'm in the company of a beautiful girl in a room filling with smoke. We exchange a love glance, her fingers brush my face, we start to embrace, then, disconcerted by the smoke, we look for a way out. She takes my hand as I lead her around the walls, searching for a door; she wears a translucent gown, flowing like flame itself, and her dark hair spills over her shoulders. Then, the room stifling, we grope and panic; somewhere in the next few moments, terrified, our hands lose grip, and when I finally kick through the thin wall with my heavy rubber boot, she fails to escape with me and I lose her.

Visions of a high blaze now and lovely lost women: I believe, lately, that I'm carrying disaster with me; my mind is catching fire.

This is the station house. In the old days, bachelor firemen usually lived at the stations, but now I'm one of the few in all Chicago who continue. Others here have families, work in three shifts--24 hours on, 48 off--but I stay near the alarms, I must, and attend as many calls as possible. My bed in the dorm upstairs is in a homey corner: books, clock-radio, my boots and breeches stacked and ready. Downstairs are the big Seagrave trucks: the two quads, the ladder truck, the new snorkel, the new pump truck with its shiny deck gun, and the Cadillac rescue unit. Over here is the classroom, the kitchen and the rec hall with ping-pong and television. The office and alarm systems are near the front door and in the rear are repair shops, storage rooms and the garage where we keep the boats and drags. Sometimes our station is involved in dragging Lake Michigan or the river, but I've traded for other duties--I do considerable cleaning and mopping up around here--so that I can stay near the alarms. A dragging operation isn't a fire, after all; one gets a sore back, a head cold or sunburn, a soggy corpse, at best, and never peers into those bright and mystic flames.

Here we go: a two-alarm, the Lake Shore station and us.

Hanging onto number-one truck with Captain Max, I curse the traffic as we whip into Lincoln Avenue. The siren begins to rev me up; I pull my suspenders tight, fasten my chin strap and wonder who awaits me. In recent weeks, it has been old Aunt Betty, the old family barber, a former high school buddy of mine from up in Skokie, a girl I used to try to pick up in a bar on Gross Point Road. Strange, all strange: I can hardly wait.

Max is something: not a particularly good captain by the book and usually in trouble with the fire marshals because he's a real buster. We hit a building and he's off the truck, yelling, coupling hoses and going in. I stomp in behind him, naturally, pulling the hose, my ax waving like his. But he's not one to stay outside and direct the proceedings, not our Max; he's a rowdy, likes his work and leads the way. I say he's a lovely old bastard. He keeps us trained and sharp and any man on our team can handle any task, so he never has to stand around with the crowd getting us organized and looking official. The two of us usually bust right in and go to work, then, each careful to watch out for the other. He's 60 years old, fearless and thinks I ought to be the next captain--though, of course, that's politics, as even he knows, and some dreamer like me who wants to live right in the fire station doesn't have much chance.

This alarm is another dilly: An empty apartment on the second floor of a new four-floor complex has smoldered for days with its occupants gone. It has finally erupted and the entire floor crawls with flame. We attack its fringes with water as I begin to bust doors looking for occupants. My eyes are wide with excitement, because I expect anyone behind the very next door: some relative, a clerk from the grocery store where I trade, perhaps a forgotten acquaintance. Everyone I ever knew is burning up, I tell you, and my throat is tight with every new room and corridor. "Here! Over here, Coker, baby!" the captain booms, and we follow the smoke, looking for its source. Fire is a tricky viper: It runs in the walls, gets in the conduits and vents, strikes at unexpected moments. I charge through a room, send an end table flying, jerk a closet open. Nothing. The snorkel passes the window, Charley Wickers peering inside like an idiot. He never knows where he's going. We cross the hall and quickly batter through another door; these new apartment houses are like kindling and the doors are easy to bust. As Max turns the hose onto the ceiling of the hallway, I hear a cry. The walls all around us are hot and scorched, but we press on; somewhere behind all this smoke is a fist of fire we have to find--and probably a tenant or two, for I think I hear the cry again.

Rafferty arrives with another hose and coupling, so that Max directs him to retrace our steps and gather what we've trailed behind us. This keeps him busy and out of our way. We run through another series of rooms, smashing windows as we go, for the smoke thickens. A dead pussycat, choked and gone. Water cascades helplessly against the outside of the building now, so that Max turns to me with a smirk, once, and says, "Jesus, they need to get in here where the fun is, right?" At about this point, we meet a wall of heat: a kitchen, the source. Max lays down a steady stream from the hose while I quickly circle back into the hall to look for another entrance.

An old man wanders the hallway. Coughing and gagging, he grabs my arms as I hold him and we recognize each other. In the smoke, he manages to speak my name, then gasps, "My daughter, in there!" And I point him on his way, assuring him there's no trouble in that direction, while I go in further search. My mother's former pastor, I knew him well: Rooker, his name was. The steepled Congregational Church in Evanston. But now a variation of the dream: She is a lanky, naked girl, screaming her head off, and I can't be sure if it's because of the fire or because her closet filled with clothes writhes with flames; I try to wrestle her to the window, but she fights me as if I wanted to throw her out. Reasoning with her, I see her try to cover her parts; she runs here, there, like a dazed antelope. "Quit it, please," I address her, trying to sound logical. "Just stop this and follow me out!" We wrestle again, fall, and her eyes open with even wider terror at my minor disfigurement. "Look, miss," I plead, "never mind your state. Take a blanket off the bed. Here, take it." But she claws at me, tussles free and locks herself inside the bathroom before I can catch her again. By now, the wallpaper is a sagging black curl. She screams and screams from behind that door and I pause, ax ready, and call to her. "Don't resist me, lady, come on! Wrap yourself in a towel, because we don't have much time!" Her scream, then, alters into a baleful moan. Too late I dislodge the door with a single stroke. The room has caved in, and she is gone to the lapping heat; the intensity turns me away, so that I find myself in the hallway. Max's voice nearby. He has discovered the old pastor, who took a wrong turn immediately after leaving me, burned into a crisp pudding. Left for a moment to hold the hose and direct the stream of water, I recall the brief sensation of that girl's breasts on me; my thoughts flare and my whole life dances in the smoke and surging orange before me.

• • •

At the station, Max and I take each other's Polaroid snapshot. He poses beside one of the pump trucks, the words American La France beside his jutting jaw. I pose in his office beneath the only wall decoration in the station, an engraving of one of the old rigs with three plump fire horses, the good side of my face turned toward the camera.

Max knows a bit of what goes on with me but doesn't ask much.

"You have to keep your pleasure to yourself in this business," he tells me solemnly, so I suspect he has a glimmer of what is happening. And of course he knows of my bad luck these last weeks, all those near rescues and disasters, but he considers that I'm one of the bravest firemen he has ever known, someone who will match him step by step into the center of a blaze, and figures that all the victims were doomed anyway.

Perhaps he feels something more: that all the unusual number and kinds of alarms in our district have to do with me. But he keeps this to himself, for he's a man who likes to do battle.

We've been close, a team, telling each other our lives. He attended DePaul (continued on page 194)Arsons of Desire(continued from page 156) University long ago on a voice scholarship; now he is married, has a grown son and doesn't go home when he can stay on call. He'll get up from the breakfast table or out of bed late at night and rush to help us. In his heart is nothing except a fire fighter. Meanwhile, I share a few vignettes of myself with him. Not a very happy childhood, but OK now. This birthmark on my left side covers my ear, my cheek, my neck, and encircles my eye, and it looks something like a burn--even the skin wrinkles a bit on that side like an ill-fitting mask--and my dumb mother said this was God's kiss. My less theological schoolmates turned their eyes away; pretty girls of my dreams like popular Alice Durning of the ninth grade fretted when I came near, and even now, those who give me a few necessary services--waitresses, the butcher--learn to do so without looking at me. Otherwise, until lately, I'm terribly normal; I like steak and potatoes, the Cubs, movies and girlie magazines. Last year, I read mostly the Tribune and Newsweek. I weigh 180 and have a few dental problems.

This is one of my sleepless nights again, so I go down to the refrigerator to cut a slice of my new cheddar and there is Max watching the Late Show. Glad to see him, I sit down and catch Brian Donlevy and Robert Preston in World War Two. Then we talk. He's sleeping at the station, because his wife's sister has arrived to occupy his bedroom. We discuss the woes of marriage, Leo Durocher, Ron Santo, slumps, bad seasons, hard luck and getting tickets from mean cops, in about that order. Max, pointing a finger, says, "Policemen need guys to break the goddamn laws, you see, just like teachers need stupid students, doctors need the sick and soldiers need victims. It's all the same."

We ponder this together and talk on.

"You knew this Rooker girl?" he finally asks me.

"Knew her father," I sigh. "Or, rather, my mother knew him. Maybe I knew the daughter, too, a long time ago, when she was just a little girl."

Max doesn't press further. He is in the presence of mystery, knows it and prefers to let well enough alone; also, he's thinking that if the alarms go tonight, he'll get in on the action.

"These girls," I muse. "We're having more and more contact, but I still don't get them out. I got scratches wrestling with this last one."

"I know, kid, I know," he comforts me. "Take it easy on yourself."

A routine day passes: two grass fires, a smoking trash dump, an auto blaze, a call for us to come wash gasoline off an intersection after an accident. Nervous, I stay at the station and don't attend these minor calls. I varnish a ladder, check couplings, show two kids around and work a crossword puzzle. Max appears for regular duty in the afternoon and brings me a milk shake.

On the following noon, we have another big one: The furnace at Park High School explodes and the old fire trap is a sudden maze of smoke and flame. We're the first there, Max leading the way, but the noise of every unit in the Loop is just behind us. I'm pulling on my jacket, barking at Rafferty to set up the rescue unit, because the lawn is already strewn with kids crying with burns; some old biddy in a charred dress wanders among us giving off a descant of hysteria and Wickers, the idiot, tries to ask directions of her; Max and I decide to hit the basement, where the flames are a steady roar. As we head down the concrete stairs with the hose, students trapped on the second floor call for us. "Hold on," Max promises. "Others coming!" And ladders and nets are unloaded from arriving engines as we head down toward the boiler room.

No secret where the blaze is centered this time: The boiler-room heat is impossible. Max stations himself outside the door and, shielded by a thin hot wall, aims the hose around the corner at the flames; I try to assist, but I'm useless. "Check that far door!" he yells, so I dash by the flaming door and follow a narrow hall to a door, mostly wired glass, which I demolish. Inside, protected from the boiler room by a thick fire wall, I find no trouble, so decide to circle behind the fire. Dangerous--because Max is occupied and out of sight--but there may be someone trapped there. Anyway, I figure that the fire has spiraled upward through the blown-out ceiling and, except for the furnace area, the basement is possibly safe, so I bust another bolted door.

I run headlong into the locker room of the girls' gymnasium.

Madhouse: 20 or 30 girls running amuck, shrieking, flitting near the flames on the side of the room where I enter, then retreating like moths. The broken door lets in a swish of oxygen and the flames suck toward it, cutting off the way I've come in as a possible exit, but I have my ax and don't panic. I go to the opposite wall, scramble over benches, climb a locker and smash two paneled windows. "Here! Girls!" I shout, but all movement blurs into a strange slow motion now, the room igniting in a soft and frenzied dance; the girl in white panties is Midge Prinz, I remember her well, and she glides near and brushes me. Seconds, mere seconds, I tell myself, and we're all lost, but the reel of my senses rattles and slows, everything awhirl, and here are my teachers and all the darlings of my 12th school year--ones who refused me at the prom, others who, casting down their eyes, knew me only as a voice. The typing instructor I adored: Miss Cates. A glistening nakedness now in the scorching heat of the room, her breasts rise in a high bounce as she floats by; the same silvered fingernails, the same mouth, and she hasn't aged in all these years. (She sat cross-legged on the desk, beating time on her pretty white palm with a ruler: our lovely metronome.) And I'm calling, Get out, Miss Cates, get out, everyone, and my coat is off as I help one mount the locker; she slips--my gloves are gone, too--and her body wets my hands, and she grabs my neck as we fall. Midge jumps on me and rides me, her eyes rolled back, mouth agape, and pleads to hide in my arms; the far wall begins to cave in. My suspenders off my shoulders, shirt open, I toss them toward the window, but they're like dry leaves floating in the room's hot pressure; they settle against me, delirious, and a scalding kiss finds my neck. Another burns my stomach. A willowy coed circles the room with my ax, then expires; here is Miss Donnelly, too, my old home-room teacher, who taught me verses I was never allowed to recite before the class, her cotton undies in her withered grip. One girl is out, perhaps two, but the window clogs with a soft and undulating mass. Reaching up, I try to pull some of them back, but their bodies are slick with perspiration and blood where they've nicked themselves on the uneven broken glass and down we go, swooning and falling, three or four of us, and I see that my coveralls are mostly burned away, black and shredded on me, though I feel no pain. "Here!" I call again, pointing the way, but Miss Cates tackles me and over we go, my head thumping against a bench.

Then I'm outside on the cool grass. Max is there, his hands burned from holding the hose around the boiler-room door too long, and we receive treatment from two attendants. "Good work, Coke, baby," he tells me. "Just great. How you ever got out of there I'll never know."

• • •

The fire marshal visits the station, commends Max and me, but mostly talks about the increased alarms in our district. He mentions possible arson and even before he's finished his speech, we're out on another call--sure enough some joker who tries to torch his own apartment.

Back at the station later, I rub salve on my neck and stomach burns and read newspaper accounts of the high school blaze; I have to find out if I dreamed it, but here it is: two janitors dead in the initial explosion, 16 girls and two instructors in the fateful locker room, another teacher upstairs, 22 on the critical list in the hospital. And here: Miss Cates and Miss Donnelly and Midge Prinz, the names just right. A fever of puzzlement comes over me.

The next morning, Max arrives at the station for breakfast and we linger at coffee, whispering to each other.

"These girls," he says. "All the ones you say you recall."

"What about them?"

"Maybe they're after you, trying to keep you inside until you get burned up." His face is drawn and serious and he places a bandaged hand on my arm.

"I've thought of everything," I whisper. "You ever heard of a telekinetic medium? People who make things fly through the air or who move objects with their thoughts?"

"Could be," he answers, his jaw set. Good old Max.

"I've wondered if some corner of my brain is setting fire to things. But there's more I don't understand. Miss Cates, for example. God, how could she be in that school?"

"I know this," Max adds. "We've never had such a season for alarms. And one of the nation's biggest, too, right here in our district."

"Someone could be playing a joke on me, but I know that isn't it," I muse, my coffee going cold in my hands. "And it isn't a dream, either--I know that much because of the newspapers."

Max pats my arm again and gives me a look of wonder and sympathy.

"Let's not worry about it," he concludes. "We both know something big is coming, another alarm. We feel it, right?"

"You, too, eh?"

"Oh, sure, Coker; God, you think I don't feel it? My knees get weak. I know something else is coming."

Waiting, now, Max keeps me at the station during all small alarms. I set all the equipment in order: the asbestos suits, the pyrene foam, the new soap machines the "wet water" and other smothering agents. I dream of sophisticated disasters--all sorts of mean chemical fires and special catastrophes.

I speculate, also, on my peculiar malady; is it part of what's happening in the city, I wonder, and the whole crazy world? Is it anarchy breaking loose? The overthrow of reason by dark forces? Such involved speculations annoy me. I'm a simple case, I assure myself: a regular guy, somewhat marred, but on balance; I had some rough adolescent moments, sure, but shook them off. I wish none of these victims ill will; I do my duty, think baseball and hamburgers, take pride in being Max's partner.

Why, though, why?

Somewhere, I know, a match has fallen into a chair to smolder; rags are seething into combustion in some stuffy closet; a cigarette has fallen away from someone's sleeping fingers; and my answer is out there.

On the day I begin to understand, I'm busy repairing the spring on a hose reel. Max and I have exchanged glances all morning and the afternoon has worn away into twilight. The reel is a bitch to fix, but I'm grateful for the preoccupation and my tools are spread out in the office so that I can monitor the phones.

The bell, when it finally comes, causes me to drop a wrench. Even before I finish taking information on the call, Max comes down the pole, bandages and all, and starts up number-one truck.

Another explosion: this time in the lab of the clinic over near Seward Park.

Seconds now: Our rhythms are quick, practiced, and no squad in the city is better. We're halfway there in 60 seconds, and I think of the job, a lab explosion: chemical, perhaps, after all, so I strap on a portable extinguisher filled with foam.

Outside the building, a large rambling affair of only two floors, Max neatly dispatches the troops; the problem is clearly to save lives and evacuate the hospital wing. We confer in an instant with a young doctor who shouts information about the floor plan, then off we go. Always helter-skelter in spite of briefings, we move into infernos never really knowing where things are. Just another job hazard.

Most of our men head toward the wards to aid the patients, but Max, an edge on his voice, calls for me to join him down near the blaze, where someone may be trapped. So we start down another hallway toward what seems a holocaust, though there isn't much smoke, because great holes have been blown in the sides of the lab; the flame boils, then, and the heat turns us inside a room.

We stand in there panting, Max saying, "That hallway is hell. Let's check out the rooms down here real quick and not get caught out there." I nod, reach back, touch my foam gun to make sure.

Then we rush out, each of us taking one side of the hallway. My first room, an office, yields no one, so I move to the second. A small examination room, nothing again, though it has a door that leads into the next. The windows are gone, I notice, and medicines and instruments are scattered: all signs of a whopping blast. And what happens next takes only seconds, another instant frozen in that old slow motion as I perceive it--for all our work is such, a science played against the clock and one's personal daring. As I pass through the door, another explosion buckles the walls and I feel the hot gush of fire at my back; hurled forward into the room, everything yellow and searing, I see a woman, a nurse, as we're enveloped. Death has its hot instant, but I have some reflexes left; we're together in the far corner beside a metal table, crouched low, fire spewing through the broken walls as I open my foam gun to fight the flames head on. The heat drives the substance back around us and suddenly we are in a cocoon of foam, a soft sponge of protection, and my eyes close and I'm away, dreamlike, letting go.

A floating bed of airy whiteness: In its liquid folds, her limbs entwine me and her body opens. We heave and settle together in the old slow dance, cushioned in rapture, and the flames are distant things, painless, as she receives me. The gun empties, my finger relaxes on the trigger and I'm gone, my senses incandescent. Lips and legs and a glowing thrust of skin: She bakes with me, melts, while the foam caresses us. Then we lie still as the room subsides.

It is Rafferty, brave soul, who comes and plucks me out.

Strange, how suddenly doom and deliverance occur; we rush in, spurt water and bust doors in what seems a comic dream, take our consequences. Fate is a moment, a mere puff.

I insist, later, on leaving the rescue unit, where they've bedded me down; stepping down from the van into the street, my legs wobbly, I view the carnage. Half the building is collapsed, thousands of gallons of water are still being pumped and the pavement is lined with stretchers. I stroll among them, doped slightly from something they've given me, checking myself; I'm a mess--third-degree burns on my back and forehead. Shouts and sirens punctuate the scene, but I don't pay attention.

They show me poor Max, who really isn't there anymore. Then I go over and look at the nurse; the attendant pulls back the sheet and there she is, calm, the little black name plate intact on her white uniform: Alice Durning. I lift my eyes back to the tower of smoke that moves across the early night.

What's happening to me, what?

I wander for another hour before someone leads me back to shelter.

On the way to the hospital, I have a curious surge of elation; I think, well, I'm alive, I made it again, and I'll be patched up soon enough and back listening for alarms. It's going to be exciting--and they might give me a chance at captain, so I'll always go in first. I'll be a lot like Max in that way. Then, moments later, depression sets in; my obsession waylays me again and I think, what's wrong with me? I'm kissed by a strange and awful God; my dread and my desire are one.