Burning Down the House by Russell Wangersky Page B

field, the fall sky streaked with long fingers of orange cloud.
    That no one would know there had been a highway crash in Canning where a dump truck loaded with asphalt had rolled over a stalled car at an intersection, the edge of the dump truck’s box clipping off the doorposts and both the heads of the old couple in the car. Some firefighters looked for the heads, others shovelled hot asphalt out of the car and away from the slowly cooking bodies. The couple had been married for decades and were just out for a drive from their Kentville retirement home.
    That I’d have no one left to talk to who would understand how a whole fire department could be overcome by laughter talking about a chicken farm fire—a fire that the chief thought was arson at first because there were so many points of origin. The barn was burning, then the front porch caught, then a small fire started under a truck. But it was far simpler than arson—and I still smile thinking about it, and still think that smile is cruel. Burning chickens run and hide. It’s a sight that’s both absolutely horrible and, in its own way, uncontrollably funny. The smell was like burning pillows, the sight like small, angry meteors rushing along the ground in straight and urgent lines.
    That no one I would meet could possibly know about the time Captain Stewart got run over by a 300-pound burning sow at a pig barn fire when he broke open the barn doors too quickly; or how, directing firefighters at another barn fire, he sank to his knees in what turned out to be a grassed-over manure pile.
    Don’t get me wrong: I was happy in some ways to close the door. I was still having nightmares, mostly ones where I repeatedly messed up simple tasks. I’ve always been bad with knots, and I’d have nightmares where tying the right knot was both essential and impossible, where the only thing in my vision was the rope I was working on. Sometimes it was nightmares about car accidents and barn fires, nightmares that left me disoriented and out of sorts when I woke up, covered with sweat, a newlywed in a downtown Toronto apartment hundreds of miles from any barn.
    That little old lady is still one of my most terrifying dreams, and I’ve been having it for twenty years now, six or eight times a year. I have it so often that there’s even a strange familiarity to it, as if the dream can move much more quickly through its opening steps now. I stand next to the car in the heat, listening to the disordered birdsong from the chattering starlings hiding up in the high branches of an elm tree that isn’t even there anymore. In the dream, once I get to the side of the car, her face is like it has always been: still, slightly annoyed, smooth-looking. And for most of the rest of the dream I just wait, smelling fuel oil and gasoline and the fresh, sharp scent of new hay—and there’s no one there but me, because all the other firefighters have left.
    Just me, standing by that car with the hose.
    Then she opens her eyes, and those eyes look angry and black, the pupils over-large and staring.
    That’s all. And I scream myself awake every time.
    The nightmares made leaving seem like the right decision, even more so when I heard that my crew from Wolfville had fought a fire at a pesticides warehouse in Canning, and that they were now getting regular blood tests to see how many different chemicals were still in their system. That testing went on for months while provincial health officials tried to determine if there would be lasting effects, the kind of time bomb no one would want to be carrying around inside him.
    I had left when I was right on the verge of wanting to look for a job in Wolfville and never leave the department, taking the pieces as they came, choosing something close to a surfing bum’s existence, hopping from short-term job to short-term job in order to be able to stay in the department and keep the wonder of the fire calls. I