1.
“What’s that?” Trudy asked.
It was dark. It was 4:30 in the morning. Someone outside was yelling — yelling at the top of his lungs.
There’d been some shenanigans at the rental house across the street last week, so I figured it was one of the evicted discontents come back to harass. As I walked from the bedroom out into the living room, I could hear better.
“Get out!” he screamed. “Get out! Get out! GET OUT!”
There was a frantic, desperate sound to his voice. After a few steps into the living room, I saw why. The yelling wasn’t from across the street. It was behind us, on the other side of the alley, just beyond the fence.
“Trudy!” I yelled. “Call the fire department.”
“What!?”
“Call 9-1-1. There’s a fire in the alley.”
2.
On the other side of our backyard, one house over from us, a roaring inferno was climbing into the black night sky. A duplex was on fire, and the flames had already consumed the backside of the building so that there was nothing to see but orange flames.
The fire roared and popped. It rose up above the two-story duplex. It rose into the canopy of the trees with dry autumn leaves beginning to fall to the ground. One of the trees caught on fire, and a huge ball of flame went hurdling skyward in an instant. Streams of glowing embers raced upwards into the darkness.
I started a sprinkler at full blast in the back of the yard. The fence behind the neighbor’s house was on fire, but Ron was out there with a hose, and he put it out.
Fewer than five minutes after Trudy called 9-1-1, fire engines began to roll in from both directions. As their lights flashed, and as two hook and ladders began to spray water down from the sky, things began to explode — loud pops and bangs and flashes of bright orange light. Gas cans for mowers? Gas tanks of cars? Then some kind of electrical explosions began to snap, loud pops and buzzing sounds and flashes of bright white light. Breaker panels?
3.
That was early this morning.
This evening I wandered into the back of our yard to peer over the fence. It is a complete loss — the carport burned to the ground, the backside of the duplex charred and most of the siding pulled away, leaving only a skeleton of the building that was there yesterday.
There were nine people and one dog in sleeping there last night. All ten escaped. And they escaped because of that man, their neighbor, who had been sleeping with his window open and woke up when the fire started crackling.
That man who woke up and began to frantically yell and scream. Until they got out.