Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [112]
“Sure.”
Finney senior turned on the television and put the cartridge into the VCR, while Finney sat on the sofa, trying not to exacerbate the burns on his neck. His father dropped the remote in Finney’s lap and sat heavily. They were both wounded warriors, though Finney’s wounds would heal, most of them. “I thought this might give you a little perspective.”
By the time news cameras reached the scene, firefighters were directing two-and-a-half-inch hose lines into the building from the parking lot. The interior was raging, but because they’d committed to an exterior attack, all they could do was wait for the flames to breach the walls; one of their primary missions would be to knock down floating embers before they ignited secondary fires up the hillside in the woods.
When Finney saw an injured firefighter being half dragged to the rear of a medic unit, it took a minute to realize that injured firefighter was him. He looked bigger than he thought he would. He also looked half-dead. It was a frightening piece of film.
What frightened him more than anything was his father’s running monologue, which was basically a roll call of the faces they were seeing on the footage, his father calling out names with calm regularity as they appeared on the screen. Finney was unable to conjure up any names at all. He hoped this memory impairment was temporary but had been told there was a good chance, given the extent of his carbon monoxide absorption, that it wasn’t. He didn’t even remember much of what the doctors had told him, only that forty percent of severe cases such as his ended up with long-term memory problems.
They’d been watching the compiled news reports for almost thirty minutes when his father said, “I don’t know where he gets off standing at the command post like that.”
“Who?”
“Back it up. There he is. If I was B-One, I would have kicked him ass over teakettle.”
Finney backed the tape up and saw a man standing five feet from Chief Smith, the picture blurred and fuzzy. It was Oscar Stillman. It took another long moment to bring up the name and remember where he knew him from.
“I didn’t realize they were friends,” Finney said.
“They aren’t. Not that I ever heard.”
“Oscar Stillman.” Finney remembered Stillman’s kindness on the fire ground Tuesday morning, how Stillman had been one of the few people who’d spoken to him. He remembered being rude to Oscar, too. That was his inclination, he’d learned, to be rude to people who were kind when he was down. “What was Stillman doing at the fire? He’s not on the call list for a multiple alarm. Now that I think about it, he was at Leary Way, too. I remember seeing him when we were changing bottles.”
“I talked to Smith at the funeral. Oscar was the reason they switched from offensive to defensive. Oscar was the one who warned him about the LPG inside the Bowman Pork building. Of course, later on they found out he’d been mistaken. But what the hell. Better safe than sorry.”
“There was no LPG inside?”
“There was one tank outside. The fire never got close.”
“You still have those tapes from Leary Way?”
“I put ’em all together on one master.”
Finney stood up. “Where is it?”
“You want it now?”
“If that’s all right.”
The Leary Way footage seemed endless, and was just as painful to watch as it had been last summer. His father, who always came to life when playing a videotape of a fire, gave a running commentary, noting hose lays that had gone awry, rigs parked too close to the building, and naming just about everyone who came across the screen. In some ways his father was like a Little League coach, the entire fire department his team. They watched for forty minutes before Finney backed up the tape and manipulated the remote to freeze a frame on the screen. It was another shot of Oscar Stillman standing at the command post next to the incident commander. “Look,” Finney said. “He’s talking to Chief Smith again.”
“You said you saw him.”
“I didn’t know he was at the command post.”
“If he hadn’t been there, we probably would have lost you. He knew that