Firetrap by Earl Emerson Page A

people out gets out of there, I don’t see it. I don’t know what happens after that, because Francher and I both get drafted to help splint leg fractures. We have four broken femurs, one bleeding out pretty good. I think her blood pressure was something like eighty palp. Twenty-three broken legs, they told us later. Only a couple of people coming out of that window didn’t get hurt. But hell, better a broken leg than another funeral, wouldn’t you say? If they’d lined up inside that window and waited until the ladder was free, we would have lost another ten people, easy.
    Six hours later, when it’s winding down and we’re thinking about going inside to look for bodies, somebody notices all these shoes in the parking lot. More than two dozen shoes lying all over the place.
    In the middle of it all, Francher wears himself out and decides to have a heart attack. He’s a smoker, so the worst part for him is they wouldn’t let him have a fag in the hospital, you know. So later we go up there with a pack of Marlboros on the end of a fishing line with a pole and everything, and throw it into his room and reel it out into the hallway a few times. It was about the only fun we had out of the whole thing.

10. KITTY TALKS AND TALKS AND…
    JAMIE ESTEVEZ >
    â€œWhat did Schmidt mean when he referred to the B and the C sides of the building?”
    â€œWherever the command post is,” Trey said, “that becomes side A, which at the Z Club fire was the south side of the building. The other three sides are lettered in a clockwise direction from side A, so that Ladder Seven and Aid Fourteen started out on side B. C was in back on the north side, where the parking lot and alley were, and the doors where Engine Thirty-three stopped initially and began fighting fire was D, to the right of the command post. The designations all depend on where the command post is.”
    â€œSo people were being dropped out the second-story window over the cars parked behind the building,” I said, pointing to the sketch he’d drawn earlier.
    â€œRight.”
    â€œAnd that was because there was only one ladder up in the back and all those people couldn’t have gotten down it quickly enough?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œWhy was there just the one ladder?”
    â€œThe only other windows back there weren’t accessible because of the parked cars, and even if they had been, we didn’t have enough manpower early on to get them laddered and unshuttered. There were just the three of us in the beginning.”
    â€œUnshuttered?”
    â€œThey were all boarded over except a second window that a woman had fallen out of.”
    Next we spoke to Brown’s crew, but after we’d concluded with Garrison and were almost finished with Kitty, they got an alarm and left us like a puff of dust. Clyde Garrison was a big man with a boyish haircut and a tuft of hair he constantly had to throw out of his eyes, a slight hunch in his back, and a twinkle in his eyes. He was a little taller than Trey. He gave a matter-of-fact rendition of the events on September third, delving into the details seemingly without emotion, though I noted that from time to time his voice cracked. He was the oldest firefighter we’d spoken to so far, in his early fifties, and had been driving Engine 28 the night of the Z Club fire.
    Garrison stated that Captain Brown had been assigned as C division, which put him in charge of the C side of the building, but had abandoned his post to climb a ladder and crawl inside the building. “I don’t think the division commander should be making rescues,” Garrison said, staring at Captain Brown. “I’ve told the captain before. It’s no secret. I told everybody who spoke to me after the fire. But that’s just my take on it. Maybe my nose is out of joint because he bumped me out of the way. Not that it does any good to be sore. I mean, in the end,