Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [58]
Ian had already switched the transmission out of drive and into pump. The fire was beginning to rip, flame licking out the front door. We were on the verge of losing the trailer, and probably the owner, too. If he wasn’t already dead.
“Look out for those dogs,” Ian said as I walked around the fire engine. I hadn’t heard any barking, but Caputo’s Dobermans had been in the back of my mind since we arrived.
26. BEND OVER AND KISS YOUR BIG OLD
WHATCHAMACALLIT GOOD-BYE
Ideally, the first-in unit at a structural fire would view three sides of a building as they roll up on it, always making sure to drive all the way past the front to see down that third side. This generally produced a fair idea of what was happening. Because the mobile home was capped at either end by thick brush, viewing three sides without a walk-around was not going to happen.
We had a couple of minutes before the rest of the units would be asking for instructions, so I set off on a quick 360 of the building.
The diesel engine, the whining pump, and the volunteers shouting at one another made it impossible to know whether there was anybody yelling for help from inside.
If you knew him as I did, you’d be as surprised as I was that Max Caputo hadn’t torched his place before now.
Calamity rained down on the man—divorces, drunkenness, car accidents, multiple manglings prior to the table saw incident yesterday, traumatic loss of teeth in bar fights, skin rashes so severe they required hospitalization. Caputo was the only man I’d ever heard of who’d been attacked by both a bear and a cougar.
What he’d probably done, I realized in a flash, was wash down the painkillers the doctors had prescribed for his severed fingers with beer, a potent combination of booze and drugs that would disorient you or me or anybody. No doubt he set fire to his own place by accident.
Black smoke was jetting out the narrow vertical bathroom window and along the roofline. The windows were coated inside with a tarlike substance, a sign the fire had been burning for some time.
It was close to a backdraft situation, and I told Ben as much when I passed him. “I’ll warn the others,” he said. Under the right conditions a backdraft could throw a door into the street, blow a firefighter across the yard, kill him and all his unborn children.
I wore multilayered bunking pants, tall rubber boots, a bunking coat and helmet. I put on my heavy firefighting gloves, gloves you could pick up a hot ingot with, then gave my radio report.
“Dispatch from Engine One. We have smoke from a single-story double-wide trailer approximately twenty by forty. Brush on three sides. We’re getting water on it now.”
In my experience dogs tended to act predictably in a fire: There were those that pooped and those that ran away. Sometimes both at the same time. A third type of dog would bark and snap at anything that moved. I had the feeling Caputo’s Dobermans weren’t running and had, by now, about pooped themselves silly. That left only the third response.
Yesterday, they had been chained at the south side of the house, but now when I stepped through the brambles, there were no dogs to be seen. The paths back here were low tunnel-like affairs beaten down by the Dobermans. At the rear of the trailer I reached a clearing and found an abandoned dog chain lying next to a tree stump, food bowls nearby.
In an open space between the rear of the double-wide and the encroaching woods, two large oil drums were on their sides, each with a capacity of maybe thirty gallons, along with half a dozen large brown paper sacks. The area smelled of dog shit. I kicked one of the drums and got a hollow sound for my trouble; the oil on the spout looked fresh. We hadn’t seen any of this yesterday, but then, we hadn’t been back here.
The property sloped away from the trailer so that the back door was accessed via seven or eight wooden steps. The door was locked, the window blacked over on the inside from the smoke. There were no water streams