Don Winslow: California Fire And Life

Fire school.

Jack's having more fun than a boy should have.

Going to class, studying his ass off, hitting a few beers with the boys in the dorm after shutting the books.

Fire school is very cool.

Next thing they get into after fire chemistry is construction. This time it's no Irish professor but a local good-old-boy contractor with a civil engineering degree who takes them through how a house is built.

This contractor is classic. Got that greased-back pompadour So-Cal left-over-from-the-Oklahoma-days look. White short-sleeved shirt with a pocket protector. Mechanical pencil and a protractor peeking out of the pocket.

And the boy knows his shit.

This is the easy part of fire school for Jack, because he's been there. Every piece of terminology that the guy writes on the board, Jack has, like done. They're not talking chemistry, drama, sex, and Greek mythology now; they're talking dormers, downspout straps, cripples, floor joists, and headers. Talking newels and king posts and trusses and wall sheathing, and these are all things that Jack's dad taught him the hard way. Which is like, carrying the shit around, putting it in, putting it in wrong and having to rip it out and do it all over again, so Jack knows whereof the contractor speaks.

Next thing they do is they go over to the shell of a building they got set up in a big old Quonset-hut hangar.

Damn thing looks like a dinosaur in a museum.

A two-room house with dormer windows — half of it just the structural shell, the other half finished out with walls, shingles, doors and windows, and the rest of the enchilada.

First each student has to walk around naming every piece of wood in the skeleton half. Name it — "door buck, stud, collar beam" — then identify the size and type of the lumber — pine 3 by 6,2 by 4, so on and so forth. Once the whole class can do that, they go over to the finished-off side and now they have to get into window sashes, types of glass, chair rails, balusters — all the stuff that Jack has come to know as "dead load," fuel for the fire.

Jack aces construction.

Next thing they look at is appliances. Go into a big empty warehouse with fire extinguishers all over the place and light fires under television sets, blenders, radios, alarm clocks, you name it. They learn how these behave when introduced to varying degrees of heat. Which is like, badly, because these puppies don't want to burn. I mean maybe if you've spent forty-seven minutes giving yourself carpal tunnel syndrome on the remote control box and still can't find anything worth watching you might want to set fire to the old Panasonic twenty-inch with picture-in-picture, but what Jack learns is that this is no easy task. You want to toast the TV, you have to bring some serious heat.

So all day they're setting fire to stuff and at night Jack humps the books. No suds sessions now; the work's getting harder and all you have to do to get your locker cleaned out is screw up one exam. Guys are dropping like fat men in a marathon. Like, Timmmberrrrrrr!!!!

So Jack's up half the night cramming Ohm's law ("The current flowing through resistance is equal to the applied voltage divided by the resistance") into his brain, or trying to memorize the ignition temperature of magnesium (1,200°F) or the length of time it will take an inch of number-two lumber to burn at a temperature of 4,500°F (forty-five minutes).

Like all day they're running electrical engineers at them, fire investigators at them, heating contractors at them. They're even running freaking lawyers at them, so at night Jack's not only boning up on the explosive properties of methane, the ignition temperature of magnesium, and the decomposition of cellulose under an open flame (C6H1005 + 602 = 5H20 + 6C02 + heat), now he also has to learn the significance of Michigan v. Tyler and The People v. Calhoun and he also has to master the Federal Rules of Evidence regarding the collection and preservation of evidence at a fire scene for the purposes of an arson prosecution.

Dig it, this is the same Jack Wade who couldn't force-feed himself two chapters of Moby Dick and now he's writing papers covering constitutional law. This is the dude who punked out of Algebra 101 and now he can tell you how much carbon monoxide will be produced by a specific mass of polyurethane burning at a given temperature.

Jack is hanging in there very strong.

Learns how to document a fire scene: how to draw a floor plan, how to overlay the progress of the fire on that plan, how to take photographs, what photographs to take and how to light them, how to take notes, how to take samples, how to collect and preserve evidence, how to interview suspects, how to interview witnesses, when to make an arrest, how to testify in court.

Guys are washing out — there are more empty desks in the classrooms, more available stools in their rare sessions at the bar — but Jack is hanging tough.

Surprising himself.

Taking all they can give.

Then they bring in Captain Sparky.

His real name isn't Sparky.

It's Sparks.

You got a guy named Sparks who becomes a fireman anyway, you got a tough guy. You got a guy who doesn't give Shit One about what anyone else thinks.

It's Jack who hangs the nickname Captain Sparky on him, because it's kind of inevitable. Sparky has no apparent sense of humor. Captain Sparky is as serious as a CAT scan, and he tells the students right off the bat that he's out to get them.

Captain Sparky stands in front of the class in his dress blues and says, "Gentlemen, the whole reason you are here, the entire purpose for providing you with this multi-thousand-dollar education, is for you to be able to go to the scene of a fire and determine its cause and origin. If you should pass this class, that will become the sole purpose of your professional life."

Looks at the class like he's Jesus Christ telling Peter he's supposed to build the church. Looking at them like he's thinking, Fat chance you dim bulbs could find your asses with both hands, let's not talk about building no church.

Anyway, hopeless as they are, they're all he's got, so he carries on with, "People's lives, futures, and financial well-being will depend on the accuracy of your determinations as to cause and origin. Your conclusions will be the basis for decisions to prosecute or not to prosecute, to convict or acquit, to hold individuals or corporations liable or not liable in civil suits. So your competence, or lack thereof, will be very critical to individuals and societies. I will do my level best to ensure that we unleash no incompetents upon the public. You will not get the benefit of the doubt. This is a pass/fail course — you pass with a grade of A. Anything below that, you fail."

Which intimidates Jack not at all because this is basically the way he was raised. You do the job right or you do it again until you do it right or you just get out.

So Jack's like, Bring it on, Captain Sparky.

"The first rule of cause and origin," the captain says, "and I quote — and you will commit this to memory — is, 'Unless all relevant accidental causes can be eliminated, the fire must be declared accidental, the presence of direct evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.'

"That is to say, that unless you can rule out all possible accidental causes, you may not conclude that the fire was intentionally set. You must classify the cause of the fire as 'Unknown.'

"Now let's look at the other classifications of accidental causes…"

Natural, Electrical and Chemical.

Natural — your basic Act of God. Lightning, wildfire, the apocalypse. A gimme putt, because when a house gets hit by lightning…

Electrical — a major source of accidental fires, Jack learns. So major a source that for a few days Jack thinks he's studying to be an electrician. They're running electrical engineers and electrical contractors through the classroom and Jack's up late at night studying standard electrical plans for your basic two-bedroom two-bath model home.