BACK LAST WINTER, Surfside sent us all to Bennettsville to watch a demonstration on the dangers of mobile- home fires. The chief over there loaded us all into a school bus and took us out into an empty cotton field near Clio where they had put up a trailer. They made it look real, with toys outside and a car parked in front. J.D. thought it was somebody's home, but I said they just wanted us to take it seriously by making it look as real as possible.
They circled us around the trailer a good distance away, told us to wear our masks and turnouts because of the smoke and heat, and then someone went inside and lit a small flame on a couch like a cigarette had been left to smolder. They had two pumpers nearby, had built and filled a pool for drafting just in case something got out of hand. Over by the bus, they pulled out this big old clock that someone said came from the Bennettsville YMCA pool, a lap clock is what they called it, and turned it on when the fireman inside said, “The candle's lit.”
We all stood out there in the cold wind and watched that clock to see just how long it took the trailer to go up. I noticed J.D. taking notes, watching and scribbling whenever the chief announced what was happening inside the trailer at each moment during the fire. In a couple of minutes, the couch was completely involved, black poisonous smoke pouring out the windows and doors. Flames danced at the windows and licked along the bottom of the door. At the twelve- minute mark, there was a sudden explosion that caught us all off guard, blowing out windows as the fire found more oxygen. The whole thing took off like it was made out of dry kindling.
The trailer itself began to glow red hot, every window full of flame. The siding and lower frame radiated a great heat we could feel even though we were a safe distance away. At about the twenty- minute mark, the whole goddamn thing just exploded. Some of the men whistled, some walked backward, some just said “god almighty” and pulled their masks on, especially those who were downwind. In thirty minutes, the trailer was gone, the car that sat outside the door gutted. The windows in the vehicle had been left down, something I do all the time when I drive up to my house, and when the radiated heat got hot enough, the interior ignited like someone had poured fuel on the seats.
When the point had been made, the chief sent his firemen in on the burn. They got the pumpers up close and hit the fire hard. It wasn't an easy one to put out because of all the plastic and siding material. Trailer construction is largely unregulated, so there's no thought put into fire safety. No thought on how the trailer is built without proper egress. There's only one door, and if the fire starts between you and that escape route, you have nowhere to go; your chances of being killed increase tenfold.
On the way back, we stopped at a Piggly Wiggly for some beer, the smell of burning plastic clinging to our clothes and skin. The young checkout girl saw my insignias and smiled when she rang up the brew. “Ya'll been working hard today,” she said.
I watched her bag the beer, gave her a ten- dollar bill to pay for it all. The boys deserved that much. “Not as hard as you, darlin’,” I told her. She smiled and I could see she was probably Kelly's age, maybe a year older. It was in the middle of the school year, in the middle part of the afternoon when this girl should have been in school, not working behind a cash register checking out firemen who are buying beer in a Piggly Wiggly. It made me want to make sure Kelly has choices. That no matter what happens between me and her mother, she will have a good life ahead of her. I smiled when she handed me my change, grabbed the bag of beer, and got the hell out of there. We drove back talking about trailer fires, hoping to never have to fight one more than twenty minutes away because after that, you might as well roast marshmallows. You're not saving anything.
That's what we learned on a cold day last year when we stood there in that field outside Clio. It's something we're all remembering right now as J.D. fights traffic to get us out to McDowell Road. It's the day after the birthday party and nobody's feeling like fighting a fire. Lori and I got into the station late, everybody there clicking tongues and shaking their heads when we walked in. Roddy said, “Anything we need to know here, Chief?” Everybody laughed at that, and I told Roddy to shut up.
J.D. was up on the Pirsch. He looked down at us both, said to Lori, “When I said take care of him, I didn't mean take him home with you.” They all laughed again and then I told J.D., “She didn't take me home with her, I took her home with me.” That got enough woofs and howls to be heard all the way down to the strand. Lori looked at me like you got to be kidding and then just walked off into her office and started working.
We all thought we were going to get a pass today, that the fire gods would let us be to heal our self- inflicted wounds and get over the party. But that didn't happen. The bell rang at eleven- thirty got us real good, and now here we are driving out to the edge of the county.
The boys are betting good money that we're on our way to put out a trailer fire. Mobile homes are strung out along the way. Most are old and run-down, and the county has yet to pave the sandy roads or set a water line for hydrants this far out. In front of us, I can see black smoke behind a grove of trees climbing into the sky fast. Whatever it is, it's alive and well, and we'll be the ones, hung -over or not, who'll have to go in there and kill it.
Where we turn off, the road is hard sand. When we get nearer the fire, the ground turns to mush. The Pirsch has difficulty maneuvering down into the small dead end where a trailer sits fully involved. There's a dog out in front of the fire barking like it knows the flames aren't supposed to be inside. It looks like Clio last winter, but this one's real and getting worse by the second. There are people standing around watching, staring at us as we struggle with the sand just to get to the fire ball sitting in front of us. Finally J.D. says, “Fuck it. We'll pull from here. It's not like we got a fire hydrant waiting.”
I radio back to Lori that we're 10- 23. J.D. and Partee start pulling lines while I go over to see if anyone can tell me who's living in the trailer. A boy straddling a homemade minibike, barefoot and shirtless, points to a young woman sitting under a palmetto with her head in her hands. She's trembling, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. “Is that your trailer, ma'am?” I ask, kneeling down, my hand touching her shoulder.
“I think so,” she says, talking to the ground. She doesn't lift her head to look at me. “I think it's mine.”
I can tell she's nearly in shock, maybe drunk too, so I yell to J.D. to radio for an ambulance and that gets him interested. I let him take my place and then help Partee throttle up the pumper. Behind the trailer sits a propane tank. It's far enough away from the burning structure that I think it will be okay. But I remember the radiating heat and that car back in Clio and make a choice at that moment not to try and fight the fire. We're out here alone and there's only five hundred gallons of water in the pumper and lots of people I can't get rid of by myself. I make the decision to cool down the propane, let the fire burn itself out. Partee concurs and we move in, fog the nozzle, and watch the tank sizzle and steam when the water hits it hard. I look at my partner when he says, “Good call, Chief.”
“Lucky call,” I say.
The air burns my face through the mask while we cool the propane. I'm starting to think we got lucky on this one, that we can handle it alone, when J.D. walks up and tells me the girl's mumbling something about her boyfriend still being inside. “Jesus, get some backup down here,” I tell him. Then I yell at Partee to keep on the tank. I need to go talk to this girl.
Teddy pulls up, an ambulance right on his tail. The girl is hysterical now trying to get up and run toward the fire. I'm holding her, wanting her to sit back down. There are people coming out of the woods from God knows where to stand too close. “We need to get a perimeter,” I tell Teddy.
“Everybody out of that thing?” he asks.
“I don't know,” I say. “She says her boyfriend might still be in there.”
“Holy shit.” Teddy walks toward the gathering crowd and begins to push them back. He's a big guy. It makes his job easier, but these people are curious and the sand is deep, so it's like trying to chase them down in low tide creek mud.
J.D. comes back over, tells me Lori is radioing Surfside for backup. He goes into another gear then, getting an IV bag ready for the girl, making sure he's saving one life out here today. I try talking to her again, asking her questions. This time I smell the alcohol on her breath, see a dark bruise under a swollen eye. She looks familiar, but I don't know why, and I don't have any time to think about it. “Where's the last place you saw him?” I ask.
There's a chilling moment when everything goes silent. I look into her eyes, trying to draw an answer out of her. I don't hear the sirens of other emergency vehicles arriving on scene or the fire eating away at what's left of the trailer. It all falls into the background as I watch the woman's face recognize my question, register its full intent, the understanding of what has occurred exploding so deep inside her soul that it can only pour out in some kind of animal- like scream. “Inside the trailer,” she screams. “He's inside the trailer.” She collapses onto the ground, J.D. over her with the ambulance attendants at his side.
I go to Partee, tell him what's up, and ask what he thinks about trying to put the rest of the fire out. He's still hosing down the propane tank, chasing small runners that try to spread fire along the ground. “We ain't looking at a rescue, are we, Chief?”
I look at the burning trailer, now nothing more than a red- hot skeleton crackling and hissing in the cooked air. “No, it's not a rescue,” I say.
“Then let's keep this tank cool so nothing else gets burned.”
I don't say anything more. I just pat him on his broad shoulders and leave him to his job.
When Surfside arrives, they throttle their pumper and hit the trailer hard. I help Partee turn our hose from the Pirsch now and we hit the trailer too with what little water we have left. Before it's over there are five fire engines and two ambulances on scene. Teddy has half the Horry County Sheriff's Department helping keep the perimeter clear. A news truck from Channel 5 is talking to Surfside because I told Strachen I had nothing to say to anyone about this tragedy. J.D. is with the girl. She's beat up, talking about a fight inside the trailer last night. None of it looks good. There'll be a full- blown investigation, a line of officers already waiting to talk to her.
Where there was fire, there remains smoldering ash, remnants of a home, and no doubt now, a life. Remains of the boyfriend are found in what used to be the hallway from the bedroom, where he must have been overcome with smoke, suffocated, and then eaten by the flames. The initial investigation suggests the fire started in the kitchen. It's a bad design when a stove and oven are built into the same wall that someone sleeps against on the other side, a wall filled with foam insulation and other materials primed and ready to burn if given the slightest chance to ignite.
The preliminary report, the one we talk about on scene, is pitiful. After the fire got going real good, the boy inside woke up, then tried to get out. He knew he was in trouble. We're talking about it while we wait for the coroner to finish up, wonder what he thought when it occurred to him that he wasn't going to make it out. Everyone's smoking cigarettes, trying to relax, when Partee walks right up to me and asks if I see anything familiar. “It's like Clio,” I tell him, but he just says, “No, that's not what I'm talking about.”
We walk over by the burned- out trailer, and then I see it—the car. It's the Roadrunner. The side nearest the fire is all bubbled up and black. The spoiler on the back end is melted and leaning toward the remnants of the trailer. The windows are blown out, the Confederate flag barely recognizable. “Jesus Christ,” I say, and then I remember the girl's face.
“Ain't that many Roadrunners around here with rebel flags in the back window,” Partee says. He nods toward what's left of the trailer. “That boy in there was driving.”
“The girl was in the backseat,” I say, but it's something Partee already knows.
He nods. “I figured that out too.”
We stand together watching the coroner do his work, the girlfriend gone in an ambulance. If she was still here, I'd try and get a name from her, find out who the boy was that died, but that will come with time. We'll know soon enough.
When the coroner is finished, I have no choice but to take Partee into the burned- out remains of the trailer to retrieve what's left of the body. “You okay with this?” I ask.
Partee nods quietly. “He ain't the one who spit,” he says. “He was the driver.”
I stop him there. “What if he was?” I ask.
Partee looks at me, his eyes tired, worn out like the rest of us. “You mean the one who spit?”
“Yeah,” I say, “that's what I'm asking.” I don't take my eyes off Partee because I want him to think about this, to know I'm asking a serious question about being a fireman. We don't have many moments around here where life and work collide and choices have to be made. “What do you think?” I say.
“Well,” Partee says, the word pulled long and hard from his mouth, “maybe I'd move a bit slower getting in there. That's about it, Chief.” He looks at me when he says this, and I can see in his face he's being honest.
“Don't matter what he did in life,” I say, “he's not apt to do that anymore.” My hand touches Partee on the shoulder.
“Then let's go, get this over,” he says.
We work with silent respect, but goddamn, it's the hardest part of the job that I have to do. If somebody walked up to me right this minute and said I could leave, I'd do it and not look back. I didn't join the force to put remains in bags. It's something that sticks deep inside your gut, something that wakes you up at night, makes it hard to breathe.
I can't begin to tell you what human beings are all about, there're just too many different kinds, and we all have our weaknesses, frailties that can get us in trouble if we don't work at minding our own business. But what I can tell you is this, we're not invincible. We die like anything else that lives and breathes. And sometimes you have to clean up death to understand that. It keeps us humble, reminds us just who we are.
After the body is removed, there's no more recovery or salvaging to be done. This particular cleanup is hard because of what the fire leaves behind, the way plastic and fiberglass materials burn. It takes us the better part of the day to finish this out; a trailer fire with a death inside is about as bad as it gets. Everybody hears about Partee's story, pisses them off for the most part and makes the work that much more difficult. We're at it until early evening, finally off the call by six when I help J.D. guide the Pirsch back into the station.
Teddy drops by with word that the boy who died was some bigwig's kid over in Columbia, says the fire might have been set by that girl. We look at Partee, who just shrugs like Teddy's news isn't really news at all. “The coroner's got his ass all tied up in knots over this one,” Teddy says.
Even though the news is tragic, we have to laugh at Teddy— he's a mess after being out in the sun and sand all day his body drooping, sweat and ash ruining his uniform shirt. He looks like he could use a drink. But before I can offer, Lori informs me I have a visitor.
“I'll let that be a surprise,” she says, “but she's on the beach. Said she was bored waiting for you.”
“Is it Cassie?” Though I know as soon as the words are out of my mouth that the beach is the last place Cassie would ever go.
“No, but you're close,” Lori says.
Teddy volunteers to drive me down, so we get into his patrol car and follow Atlantic Avenue until it dead-ends into South Wac-camaw. When I get to the beach I find Kelly in the water on her board, she and Ellen Thomas trying to ride waves on a flat ocean.
“Jesus,” Teddy says. “I thought she was with Cassie.”
“She was,” I say. And then I walk down to the water's edge, my finger pointing toward Kelly until she sees me. I draw her in, pull my hand toward shore as if I am grabbing her through the hot air. I'm tired and angry because I have been around fire and waste and death today. Tomorrow I'll be glad she's home, and I'll ask her why she left camp after only four days. But right now, I tell Teddy to watch me because I'm not sure what I might do to this girl when she gets within my reach. I stand there waiting, wanting to know how in the hell she got home. Wondering if her mother knows she has run away.