The Smoke Room (11 page)

“Not me. I’m a millionaire. Or I will be tomorrow when Doublemint hands over those bags.”

It was almost fifteen minutes later when the back door to the station opened and Chief Abbott popped his head into the TV room. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Like convicts behind a guard, we followed him down the dark hallway and outside, where smoke was drifting out the lower tower windows and spreading across the twilight-dampened drill court. In the eastern sky the last of the day’s sun reflected off the high clouds.

“Just coats, helmets, and gloves,” said the chief.

The three of us walked over to Engine 29 and put on our gear, then walked back to where Chief Abbott stood with his hands behind his back. He wore his bunking coat and helmet as if he were going to perform along with us, although we knew he wasn’t. He rocked back on his heels and then up on his toes, eyeballing us each in turn, his gray eyes bulging like grapes.

He stared at us for a few seconds. “I’ve got something new here. I had Training leave that burn barrel for us.”

“Really?” said Johnson. “We thought somebody was in trouble.”

“Somebody is in trouble,” I whispered. “Us.”

“Okay. Upstairs,” said Abbott.

When I headed for the stairs at the base of the tower, Johnson said, “We have to know what drill we’re doing, don’t we?”

Tronstad touched him lightly on the shoulder. “Figure it out, Robert.”

Johnson and Abbott stared at each other until it became clear to Johnson. “I ain’t doin’ it,” he said. “You can’t make us.”

“I can make you do up and overs,” said Abbott. “I can make you lay every foot of goddamn hose you’ve got on that rig, and then I can make you lay it again. I can keep you here all night long! That’s what I can do!”

In drill school an “up and over” meant running up the stairs of the seven-story tower and down the fire escape, a steel ladder that dropped straight to the ground—or, if the instructors felt peevish, up the fire escape and down the stairs. It was an evolution where a mistake could drop a recruit eighty feet onto concrete. In drill school up and overs were done three times a day and were frequently used for punishment. It got so that scrambling down a seven-story fire escape at full speed meant nothing. But then, that was the point.

“You don’t mind, Chief, I’ll do the up and overs. Tell me when to stop,” Tronstad said, heading up the stairs at a jog-trot.

Abbott barked after him, “Run, buddy. We don’t
walk
our up and overs.”

Johnson gave me a long look. I knew how much heights disagreed with him, how he’d forced himself to deal with it during drill school, and how he swore he would never get on a roof or climb a fire escape again if he could avoid it. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen to work at Station 29, where most of our fires were in single-story residences.

“Chief?” Johnson said. “I don’t ever recall any firefighter past probation being asked to go in the smoke room.”

“You don’t think it’s legal?”

“
I
never heard of it.”

“You can step into the room with the kid here, or you can call your union rep after I write charges on you. Your choice.”

Like a couple of reluctant adolescents trudging into the gym teacher’s office for a paddling, we marched up the stairs to the smoke room, which was situated between floors one and two, Abbott on our heels. Outside the closed door Abbott pulled out a stopwatch on a knotted shoestring. Holding his breath, he opened the heavy metal door with one hand and said, “It’s only one minute. Get in quick. I don’t want to let that smoke out.”

I stepped into the small concrete room and turned to the chief. “I’ll do the up and overs.”

“Too late,” said Abbott, pushing Johnson into me. “Too damn late.”

The door closed with a metallic
clank,
and we were submerged in darkness and smoke. It was as if we’d been put in a dungeon. Straining not to inhale, I turned on my flashlight but couldn’t see much except grayness. When I finally took a breath, I felt that old familiar feeling that I was being smothered with a dirty pillow, as if my lungs had been stuffed with wool gloves.

15. PUSHED IN, SEALED UP, FUCKED OVER

ANYBODY WHO’S BEEN
on the wrong side of a campfire when the wind switches directions has a hint of what the first two or three seconds in the smoke room are like. After those first few seconds, though, things grow exponentially worse in a way that is almost impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t lived through it. The moment you realize you’re not getting out is the moment you begin to think you’re dying. Thirty seconds seem like half an hour, and a minute seems like a week.

You choke and your eyes water and your nose runs, and if you’re not smart, you cough, and when you do that you inhale quickly and take in more smoke, which makes you cough again, and then you get into a cycle where it feels as if someone’s taken a chainsaw to your lungs.

Some say it’s as bad as being forced to breathe underwater. You crawl around on your stomach searching for that one good, clean patch of air that hasn’t been saturated with carbon monoxide and soot. You try to move to the doorway to get the scant fresh air oozing in under the crack, but there’s always somebody in front of you, somebody with his face pressed up against the door. Tonight that somebody was Robert Johnson.

The worst part isn’t that you think you’re dying. The worst part is that you
are
dying, that you are in the first stages of death by CO poisoning.

It becomes a test of will. You hold on because others before you have held on. Because the instructors and other recruits are waiting for you to crack, and you’re determined not to give them that satisfaction. You hold on because your career depends on it. Strangest of all, you hold on because you know it’s good for you. You know that someday as a firefighter you may end up in a situation where you’re trapped in smoke and where you’ll grasp on to that hairsbreadth of difference between surviving and dying, that you’ll survive because this experience gave you the framework, the reference point to persevere instead of panic. You do it because it’s necessary. But that was in drill school. We’d already proved ourselves, every one of us.

“This is bullshit,” said Johnson as soon as the door closed. “We’re not recruits.” When I joined him on the floor, I pressed the light button on my watch and took note of the second hand.

I took a quick circuit of the ten-by-twelve-foot room and rejoined Johnson at the door, trying not to inhale. “How long?” Johnson asked, strangling on the words.

“Twenty seconds.”

“Fuck.”

We knew every time we took smoke we were shortening our lives, dumping poisons into our lungs, liver, and kidneys, increasing our chances of heart disease and cancer. This
was
bullshit. Abbott had exceeded his authority, and it pissed me off, too.

Outside the door, we heard Tronstad run past, calling out the floors as he passed each, as was the custom. You could tell from the amount of air he had behind his voice that he was dogging it.

I glanced at my watch again. We’d been inside a minute now, and even though we were “cheating” by scooping up what little fresh air filtered in under the door, we were also dying, especially Johnson, who was beginning to breathe in small gulping hiccups. “One minute,” I announced.

“Okay. That’s enough,” Johnson said loudly. “We’re coming out now!”

Without removing his face from the sweet spot at the base of the door, Johnson reached up and fumbled for the knob. When he continued to fumble, I sat up and pulled hard on the door. It didn’t budge.

“It’s stuck.”

“It’s stuck, Chief,” Johnson shouted. “Let us out. The door’s stuck!”

I was sure Abbott could hear the panic in Robert Johnson’s voice. Maybe this was easier for me because I’d been through drill school more recently. Or because I was younger.

It was then that the minimal quantities of fresh air that had been flowing under the door were shut off. When I turned on my flashlight I could see Chief Abbott had blocked the crack under the door with a rag or his coat.

“You boys getting a good taste of it?” Abbott asked from the other side of the metal door.

“Chief! Chief?” Johnson pounded on the door, his blows thunderous in my ears, which were close to the door. “Chief. Let us out of here. Damn it, let us out!”

“Maybe now you’ll tell me where you got that bearer bond?” Abbott asked.

“Wha—?”

“That bearer bond. And all the other bearer bonds. How many
do
you have?”

“Chief?”

“Talk to me, boys. You’re in there. I’m out here. It’s going to stay this way until you tell me about the bonds.”

Johnson started crying.

“Think it over. I’ve got all night. Your time may be limited.”

I looked at my watch. “It’s been two minutes, Chief.”

“You pussies aren’t going to wimp out on me, are you?”

“Let us out,” gasped Johnson.

“Not until you tell me what I want to know.”

“This is crazy!” Johnson wailed. The panic lacing his voice would only encourage Abbott. “Let us out of here. We didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Tronstad took them bonds.” The talking was too much for Johnson, who erupted into a series of loud, wracking coughs. My lungs were like sandpaper, and I was pretty close to coughing myself. I’d been trying to conserve energy, but the fact that we were locked in created a panic I’d never felt in drill school, where you could cry uncle whenever you wanted, then afterward go upstairs to the training chief’s office and sign a resignation form. There had always been a way out. Tonight the only way out was past Abbott.

I tried the knob again, but the door was frozen.

We were going on three and a half minutes. The longest I’d ever stayed in the smoke room was two minutes, and that had kicked my butt. I began pounding on the door, hoping Tronstad would hear it when he ran past.

Johnson managed to suppress his coughing long enough to say, “Tronstad was the one. Tronstad—” I shouldered him hard, knocking him over, leaning into him with all my weight.

“Shut up,” I whispered. “We’re not going to tell him a thing.”

“He’s killing us, Gum. I got to.”

“Not like this.”

After a twenty-second silence, Abbott said, “You guys still in there?”

Neither of us moved or spoke.

“Gum? Johnson? You guys okay?”

Moments later the door opened slowly. I scooted out onto the concrete landing while Johnson piled out on top of me. The concrete hurt my knees, but I scrambled to the stairs, where a light breeze from the north kept the smoke off us. Suddenly we were breathing the cool Seattle night air again.

Hacking and slobbering as if he’d been Maced, Johnson sat on the concrete step beside me. I could hear the asthma acting up in his lungs. I didn’t feel so hot myself. We’d been inside just under five minutes.

Chief Abbott had secured the inward-opening door with a rope, one end around the handle, the other around his waist.

The look of delight in his eyes made me want to knock him down. “So. Let’s hear about the bonds.”

Johnson coughed. I remained teary-eyed, snot-nosed, and silent.

“We made a deal, men. I let you out. You talk.”

The effects of carbon monoxide don’t hit you all at once. My first month out in the company, we had a fire victim with CO poisoning who was talking to us, said he felt fine, and died ten hours later in the hospital. It remained to be seen how sick we were.

Tronstad climbed down the last few rungs of the fire escape on the outside of the building, then jogged up to where we were blocking the steps, a look of incredulity on his face. “Jesus fucking Christ. How long were they in there, Chief?”

“Five minutes,” I said.

“It was more like a minute and a half,” said Abbott. “Anybody can’t take a minute and a half should go join the Girl Scouts. When I came through drill school, they kept us in there five, ten minutes at a pop. They made us recite pump procedures. They made us do push-ups. I had to, I could sit in there for a half hour and play cards. And you pussies are crying about a minute and a half.”

“Five minutes,” I repeated.

Standing behind and above me, Abbott prodded my back lightly with the toe of his uniform boot. “I’m holding a stopwatch here, son. Let’s see where I stopped it. Right. Just like I said. One minute, thirty-five seconds. Look for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

“Shit, Chief,” said Tronstad. “You tryin’ to kill these boys?”

“Now that we got the trial run over with,” said Abbott, “I’m going to ask you each to go in for two minutes. Alone this time. Don’t worry, Gum. Your friends’ll be outside to make sure of the time in case your brain starts playing tricks on you again. After that, we’re through for the night. Simple as that. Everybody in the battalion has to do it. You guys just happened to draw first straw.”

“Two minutes?” Johnson asked, a note of hope in his voice. Hard to tell what he was thinking. I wasn’t going back in. Nor was I planning to argue with Abbott about it. I’d taken enough smoke. My head was spinning, my legs felt heavy, and my lungs were like blisters.

“I’ll stoke up the burn barrel, and then we’ll begin. You, too, Tronstad. No shirkers this time. We’re all going to do it.”

Abbott didn’t notice the look Tronstad gave him. If he had, he wouldn’t have stepped into the smoke room alone.

As the chief went in to tend the fire, carefully sealing but not latching the door behind him to preserve the smoke buildup, Tronstad whipped out his body loop and connected it to the rope Abbott had tied to the door handle, pulling on the rope, closing the door, effectively locking Abbott inside.

Tronstad gave us a devilish grin and bobbed his eyebrows up and down. “He said
we.
That means him, too. Right?”

“Geez, that’s the chief,” Johnson said.

“Come on. Give me your body loop, Gum. I’ll tie them together.”

There was an eye bolt sunk into the concrete just below the window, and it was through this eye bolt that he secured the connected body loops—a three-foot-long piece of webbing sewn into a loop that every SFD firefighter carried—cinching the end so the simple friction of the arrangement held the door closed.

“You can’t do this,” I whispered.

“Watch me. He’s not supposed to be pulling this shit and he knows it. Don’t look so shocked, Gum. What, you think I’m going to do to him what he just did to you guys? Don’t worry, I’ll let him out after a minute, but he deserves a taste of his own medicine. If you don’t like it, get out of here.”

Abbott tried the door handle, then began banging on the metal door with his fists. He banged as if his life depended on it, then screamed at the top of his lungs. He kicked the door. Of all the recruits I’d seen go through the smoke room, I’d never heard anything like it.

Johnson pulled on my coat sleeve and said, “Come on, let’s go. We don’t want to be here when he comes out.”

Reluctantly, I followed Johnson down the stairs and into the bowels of Station 14, into the beanery, where the windows overlooked the drill court and where if you stuck your head out, you could see the tower off to the right.

Johnson washed his face in the sink, then swigged down a glass of water. When he was finished, he parked himself far enough away from the windows that he couldn’t hear Abbott’s pleas. “Tronstad’s in big trouble.”

“No shit.”

“You don’t lock a battalion chief in the smoke room and walk away from it.”

“No shit.”

“I guess thinking about all that money’s making him a little cocky.”

“No shit.” We looked at each other for several beats and then, inexplicably, began laughing. I reached out and closed the swing-out window so our laughter wouldn’t drift outside.

“What do you think they’re doing?” I said after we’d sobered up.

“Probably Abbott made Tronstad go in.”

“Tronstad wouldn’t do it without us there.”

“Maybe after getting a dose himself, Abbott reconsidered.”

As I looked at my own reflection in the beanery window, a Metro bus whizzed past a hundred yards away on the east side of the drill court, the windows filled with Friday night commuters.

In the past month I’d become a different person. Where I’d once been the greenhorn recruit, I was now a man of some experience, boinking a woman years older, messing up an alarm that resulted in civilian deaths, facing my mother’s impending demise, and fighting off bouts of depression over the way my life was tanking.

In the reflection of the window, I saw the tidy little brown-eyed boy I’d always been. I still felt like a boy. I couldn’t even honestly say I felt like a boy in a man’s body, because I felt like a boy in a boy’s body. I suppose that was part of my attraction to Iola Pederson, who treated me like a boy most of the time.

When a face appeared in the window beside mine, it took half a second to realize he was outside in the drill court. Tronstad pulled the window open and inserted his head in the opening. “You two better get out here. We got trouble.”

“Oh, shit,” said Johnson.

“Just kidding. Just kidding. What’s on TV?”

“What do you mean, what’s on TV?” I asked. “What did the chief say when you let him out?” Tronstad looked at me blankly. “Didn’t you hear me? What did the chief say?”