3000 Degrees by Sean Flynn Page A

pumps that could feed five, and sometimes six, hoses at once, all from a single connection to one hydrant. And the pumps could regulate the water pressure more efficiently; connecting a line directly to the main required wrenching back the hydrant to slow the flow, an imprecise and laborious method. Mike explained that to the brass, suggested that their engines were being used as overpriced hose wagons.
    “What's the matter with the way we been doin’it?” the older guys would snap. “You saying we're doin’it wrong?”
    “No, no, no,” Mike would answer. “I'm just saying that there's a better way to—”
    “A better way? So we're doin’it wrong. That's what you're saying, right? We've been doing it wrong?”
    That was when Mike decided to teach, work with the young guys before they could fall into the old routines, shake things up. He stayed with it for five years, long enough to get more than 120 recruits onto the trucks. About a quarter of them were assigned to Group II, five to his home station. He was responsible for what they learned years ago. Now he was responsible for getting them home at the end of the shift.
    T he alarm squawked from the speaker bolted to the wall at about quarter past five. Every man froze. Their muscles tensed. Their adrenal glands quivered. No one made a sound, waiting for the next noise out of the speaker. Most times, only words followed. “Engine 1,” dispatch might have said, or “Engine 8” or “Ladder 5”—but only one truck—before reciting an address and a task. One tone signaled a medical run or some other minor emergency, like going out to stabilize a coronary case until an ambulance arrived, or breaking a toddler out of a locked-up Taurus, or squirting water on a flaming car. Milk runs.
    Sometimes, maybe every fifth time, a second tone followed the first. Two tones meant something more serious, perhaps a fire alarm ringing somewhere, but probably triggered by nothing more than a stray wisp of cigarette smoke or a burp of electrical current jiggling a circuit. Dispatch sent two engines and one ladder truck for those, picking whichever units were available and close.
    Much rarer were three tones. Three tones meant a reported structure fire, a house or a condo or a strip mall already blowing smoke into the sky. Firemen longed for a triple. Three tones meant there would be blazing orange heat and churning black clouds and pockets of poison gas, wailing sirens and blinding lights and scalding steam and great, splashing floods. Three tones meant bashing in steel doors and smashing out glass windows and chopping jagged holes through steep, pitched roofs. Men with long metal spears and iron hooks would rip into ceilings and walls, chasing veins of fire hiding behind the plaster and above the joists. Yards of hose would uncoil through puddles of sooty water, and ladders would stretch up a hundred teetering feet. The sensations, the sights and sounds and smells, would be horrifying and exhilarating all at once. “Enough fire for everyone,” is what the veterans would say if the fire really started raging, and they would say it giddily, greedily, like little boys who'd stumbled into an unlocked candy shop.
    Three tones didn't always turn out that way, of course, and not every man wished that they would. (One of the theorems of the station house was the Rule of Three, which held that every fire required three times more men to show up than were needed to put it out because one third wouldn't want to be there and another third wouldn't know what they were doing.) But a working fire promised at least the chance of action, and that is what a certain breed of firefighter craved. Paul, Jerry, Yogi, Robert A., Captain Coakley, nearly every man on Central Street was of that breed. They would feel more alive when confronted by the possibility of death, surrounded by it, threatened by it. They would not be afraid but only aware, in the same way that an alpinist, cramponed to a rock