Page 71 of Christmas with Three Firemen

The radio said commercial building, heavy smoke showing. The radio didn’t say that the world outside the windshield would be gone.

A second storm system moved in overnight, worse than the first by every forecast I’ve seen, and the alarm goes at six forty-seven in the morning right in the middle of it.

The fire announces itself before the building does, an orange stain bleeding upward into the white, and then we’re on scene. The structure looms up all at once, a three-story commercial taxpayer with fire showing on two floors and smoke pouring into the storm to be torn apart.

I take my place at the perimeter, behind the line, where I belong.

The crew goes in.

I’ve heard buildings fail on recordings, in testimony, in my own reconstructions, and none of that is the same as hearing it live through a wall of snow, a deep wrong shifting, like something enormous clearing its throat, and then a percussion I feel in my boots before it reaches my ears.

The radio erupts.

Partial collapse, interior, second floor into first. Mayday. Mayday. The word cuts through the storm and through my coat and through my sternum, and then the traffic is a fast overlapping surge of it, all members report, and one by one the voices come back, Tara, Callum, Danny, Wes, until there is one voice that doesn’t.

“Ruiz, report.”

Static. Snow.

“Ruiz.”

And then, thin, compressed, wrong: “Yeah, I’m, yeah. I’m here. Something’s on me.” A breath that costs him. “Second floor, northeast. I’m pinned. I’m okay. I’m pinned.”

I’m okay. I’m pinned.

Two sentences that cannot both be fully true.

The radio gives us his voice at intervals, and each interval is worse arithmetic than the last: first he’s narrating, cracking a joke about the building’s poor manners, and then he’s answering in shorter sentences, and then he’s mostly breathing.

Wes’s voice says stay with me, brother, keep talking, and Mateo’s voice says something too quiet for the radio to carry, and the storm keeps pouring down onto all of it.

Four minutes. Six.

My chest closes at eight.

It starts in my hands.

That’s new. Usually it’s the chest first, but my hands go wrong before anything else, the fingers losing their certainty, and I look down at them gripping the tape line as they belong to someone else.

Then my breath goes, and I’m down in the snow at the tape line with the orange plastic cutting into my palms. Someone nearby has a radio clipped to their vest, turned up loud enough to carry, and Wes’s voice comes through it, stay with me, brother, keep talking, and then it stops. I don’t know when it stopped.

“Hey.” A hand on my elbow. “Hey, you okay?”

A cop. Young, hat pulled low, concern on his face that’s doing its best to look professional. He’s talking to me the way you talk to someone you’re not sure about yet.

“Fine,” I say. The word comes out wrong, too thin, and he hears it.

“Okay,” he says, not believing me. “Come on, let’s get you back from the tape.”

He doesn’t ask again. He gets an arm under mine and walks me back ten feet to the engine bumper and parks me there with my back against the warm metal, and I don’t fight him because my legs aren’t in a state to argue.

He stands nearby, checking on me twice without making a production of it, and after a while the metal at my back and the solid fact of the bumper beneath my hands gives my body something to measure itself against.

My breath finds its way back on its own.

The radio keeps working. Cribbing in place. Airbag going under. I translate each transmission the way Wes taught me: this is good, this is progress, until the radio says:

“We have him. He’s out. He’s out, he’s talking.”