Читать книгу Burning Down the House - Russell Wangersky - Страница 14

SIX

Going to an autumn fire in White Rock, and the pumper was racing along the narrow Nova Scotian back roads. I watched the high grass whip by on the shoulder without knowing what was in front of the truck, without ever knowing what was coming. Hanging on tight, hearing the air brakes muscle on, feeling the truck tilt down in the front end and my shoulder press into the back of the truck, the hose nozzles dangling down and banging hard against the metal plate.

The house in White Rock was burning fast; I could tell that from the pillar of dirty yellow-black smoke I could see when the truck was at the crossroads a mile or so away. A big thumb-smudge of smoke, the kind of smoke that made one of my hands check the front of my fire coat, that made me mentally walk through the steps of putting on breathing apparatus and pulling hose. In my head, my left arm was already through the loops that hung from the attack line and my body was bending away at an angle with that first tug. I was pulling those loops in my imagination long before the truck stopped, spilling the flat yellow coils across the grass, waiting for the pump operator to pull the lever and fill the line with water, snapping the flat hose round and popping the sharp kinks into smooth curves.