Report from Engine Co. 82 (11 page)

“No! No!” she says. “No ambulancia.” She understands that. The Chief says that our job is done here. The woman lies back on
her pillow, and is breathing quite regularly now. “Gracia,” she says. “Gracia, gracia,” her husband says.

We race back to the scene of the accident. Chief Niebrock has already taken Bob to the hospital in the Chiefs car. John Milsaw
is sitting on the curb. He is shaken. Charlie McCartty finds himself in a role he has played before. He’ll be O.K., John.
Don’t worry.

Marty Hannon tells us the story. Matt Tunney was driving Engine 85’s rig. They were going to Jennings Street, but they saw
a man waving wildly one block before, at 170th Street. Matt jammed on the brakes, but Ladder 31 didn’t have enough time to
stop behind them. John Milsaw tried to avoid the guys standing on the back step, but couldn’t. Beatty tried to jump out of
the way, but got caught between the back rail of the pumper, and the front of the truck. It was just his arm and leg though.
If his chest had been hit, it would have killed him sure. The alarm at Jennings Street and Southern Boulevard was false.

“What about the guy waving?” I ask.

“Drunk,” Marty says sadly. He spreads his hands, and says, “What can you do?” His Irish face looks like it is going to be
wet with tears.

It is now seven-thirty, and daylight is shining on the South Bronx. We are all sitting in the kitchen awaiting news of Bob.
I have had five cups of coffee in the past three and a half hours. We’ve all sat here since the accident, except for the two
false alarms and the one rubbish fire.

Bob limps slowly into quarters, being held up by the Bronx Borough Trustee of our union. It is the trustee’s job to look after
all seriously injured firemen, or their next of kin. It’s a rotten job.

The trustee says that Beatty refused to be admitted to the hospital. He wanted to go home. He doesn’t like hospitals. The
doctors were furious, but there was nothing they could do to detain him. The trustee says that Bob made a lot of noise at
the hospital.

The Beast looks dead. There is dried blood all over his clothes, his head is bandaged, his arm is in a sling, and the side
of his face is completely scraped. He must have hit the ground hard.

I can tell that he is still in great pain. He gives Marty Hannon the keys to his locker. “Just get my clothes, Marty. All
I wanna do is go home.” Everyone wonders why his leg isn’t broken.

The trustee says that the X-rays showed no breaks. He tells us again how mad the doctors were. Marty comes down the stairs
with the Beast’s clothes, and he puts them in the trustee’s car. It takes great effort for Bob to get into the car. He shouldn’t
have gotten out of it to begin with. He grimaces as he bends his leg to put it in the car.

“So long guys.”

“So long Bob.”

“All I want to do is go home. The trustee will drive me home.”

I’m anxious to get off duty and to get home. I’m tired, and I need to sleep. I shouldn’t have drunk all that coffee.

I
T’S
2:30
A.M.
We’re spraying 250 gallons of water a minute at the fire and it seems like the wind is driving each cold drop back into our
faces. With each bitter gust I swear to God I won’t stand another one. But, I do—another, and another. We’ve been here over
an hour now. The fire is still burning freely. If we could only go inside the building and get close to the heat. The Chief
says it is too dangerous—that the roof might collapse at any moment. I’m breathing through my mouth, because the cold has
penetrated beyond the roof of my nose and my head aches. The wind picks up and now the water is hitting us like pellets shot
against a plastic surface. Icicles have formed on the protective rim of my leather helmet, and they break off as I move to
reinforce my grip on the fighting hose.

“Why don’t we get some relief here?” I yell to the men supporting me from behind, the men of Engine Company 82.

“Do you want a blow on the line, Dennis?^ Benny Carroll yells over the wind and the noise of the fire. Benny was once a student
at the Fort Schuyler Merchant Marine Academy, and I wonder as he approaches if he ever thought that his life with the sea
would be realized by directing hundreds of gallons of water through a brass nozzle.

“Yeah, Benny, you take it for a while,” I say, as he grasps the hose, “but what I really want is a bearskin rug in front of
an open fireplace.”

“Say no more,” says Benny laughingly—an expression he always uses for agreement.

Kelsey, Knipps, and Vinny Royce will back Benny up on the line. It’s my turn to get lost for a few minutes. Lieutenant Welch
is standing nearby watching, waiting for the roof to cave in. I tell him that I’m going to look for a place to get warm. The
water has frozen over his rubber coat, and it flares at the bottom like a ballerina’s dress. Because he is an officer he has
to stay with the men on the hose line at all times. He is jumping from foot to foot trying to get his blood to circulate.
He looks at me and nods his head. He doesn’t talk because he knows words don’t mean anything at fires like this. He only cares
about putting enough water on the fire. Tom Welch has been working in the South Bronx for over fifteen years, and he knows
there is no challenge in this fire. If we were crawling down a hallway or fighting our way into a cellar, he would be talking
all the time. He would be saying the words that give us the confidence to move into a building everyone has run out of. But
now we are just standing in front of a building, pouring water on it. It’s cold, and our bodies are being beaten, and Lieutenant
Welch just nods.

As I walk down the street in search of a warm hallway I hear a soft but distinct crashing noise, like someone dropping a steel
safe on a pile of thin balsa wood. As I turn I see a giant mushroom of fire surge toward the sky. Part of the roof has fallen,
and the new oxygen overhead acts like a magnet for the fire.

The old, dying building is a three-story wooden structure called a Queen Anne. It’s the kind of gothic house that Edgar Allan
Poe would have delighted in writing about. It has a series of peaked roofs and widow’s walks, and many small rooms with spaces
between the walls and between the ceilings and floors. This type of building is particularly difficult for firemen to work
in. Fire spreads quickly in small enclosed spaces.

It was just a little over an hour ago that we were sitting in the firehouse kitchen. The radiators were hissing, and the coffee
was steaming. We had already responded to twelve alarms since our tour of duty started at six o’clock, and, except for one,
all had been small ventures into the night’s cold. Two were mattress fires, one was a burning abandoned car, and the rest
were garbage fires or false alarms. The exception was a midnight alarm for a burning couch. We saw the smoke coming from a
window on the sixth floor of a tenement building on Charlotte Street. It seems that most of the fires we have are on the top
floor. Each time I drag hose up five or six flights of stairs I curse the designer of the building, and I think how much easier
the job would be had he taken fircfighting into consideration. He could have put a standpipe in the building, or at least
a well between the staircases so that the hose could go straight up instead of snaking around the bends.

We stretched four lengths of hose into the building, and five more lengths trailed behind to the fire hydrant. Nine lengths
of hose for a rotten couch fire that could have been extinguished with a glassful of water five minutes earlier. The guy who
lived in the apartment was sitting on the stairs in the hall, smoking a cigarette, and saying that he didn’t know how the
fire started. He looked and sounded drunk, but who knows? And when you think about it, who cares?

The weather got to us on Charlotte Street. When we tried to uncouple the hose connections we found them frozen solid. Each
of the five lengths laying in the street were bound together by the cold, the cold that now prevents my fingers from moving.
We had to lift each 71-pound length of hose over the standing exhaust pipe of the fire engine to warm the connections. This
kind of extra work is frustrating because there is no one to blame but nature.

Kelsey and Knipps had involved almost everyone in the kitchen in a plan to beam the ceilings in Knipps' house. Plans were
being worked on, and a scale drawing was put on the blackboard. Knipps had asked Kelsey if he knew anything about installing
overhead beams. Kelsey asked everyone else. And what had begun as a simple inquiry turned out to be a full-scale project where
beam designs were being created for all his rooms. Firemen are like that. The slightest problem or question invites full participation.

That is what we were doing a little over an hour ago when a second alarm was sounded for Box 2317, Forest Avenue and 158th
Street. Plans, drawings, coffee, and hissing radiators were left behind as we hustled our way to the fire.

Three engine companies were assigned on the first alarm, and two ladder companies. When the Battalion Chief saw the large
body of fire he ordered a second alarm. Engine 82 was assigned on the second. We could see the red glare in the sky as we
left our firehouse, which is about a mile away. As we turned the corner on Forest Avenue we saw that Engine 73 and Engine
41 were backing their lines out of the building. We knew then that we would be here for some time, because the faster you
can get close to a fire, the faster it will be extinguished. But because of the imminent danger of a roof collapse it was
impossible to get close.

Now I’m standing across the street from a burning building, and I’m hoping for its quick destruction. If the rest of the roof
would only come down, then we could go in and put the fire out.

I can hear the firehouse radiators hissing as I walk down the street searching for a warm hallway. Except for the burning
building’s, the hallways on the block are cold. I try each door, but as I enter I find each colder than the one before. I
return to the building directly across from the fire. Several firemen from other companies have the same idea as I, and are
standing around the lobby. They are walking back and forth, or jumping up and down. It is too cold to sit on the floor and
relax. I take a cigarette out, and heavy smoke pours from my mouth as I ask for a light. Three men search their pockets before
a dry pack of matches is found.

Jim Gintel from Squad 2 lights my cigarette. Jim is an old friend of mine. We played the bagpipes together in the Emerald
Society band.

“Bad night, Dennis, bad night!” he says as he takes his rubber coat off. Like all of our coats, his coat is frozen, and it
stands by itself against the wall. The lobby light is reflected by the ice and the coat appears jeweled. Jim laughs, “Now
if we were only Pigmies we’d have a ready-made tepee.” Everyone laughs at Jim’s joke, but nobody adds to it. It’s too cold
to be funny.

I can’t help thinking that in another place, another city perhaps, wheie fires are uncommon and exciting, apartments up and
down the street would be opened, and residents would be serving coffee and biscuits and offering the warmth of their homes
to the firemen and to the victims of the fire. I think of Dylan Thomas' Miss Prothero asking if I would like something to
read. But we are in New York City where neighbors traditionally don’t bother to find out each other’s names, where people
live their lives within the walls of their apartments, where a raging fire across the street bums unwatched.

There are six doors around the lobby, but it is almost three o’clock in the morning, so I erase the thought of knocking on
any one of them from my mind. I remind myself that people have to go to work in the morning. Anyway, this is what I am paid
for—fighting fires all the time, not just on pleasant spring afternoons.

Jim Gintel, who was pacing, jumping, and rubbing his arms, has found a seventh door.

“Hey man, anyone got a claw tool?” he asks, his words echoing through the hall. He is a medium-sized man with graying hair,
and he wears an ever present smile. Even in the worst situations Jim has something funny to say. We were once trapped above
a fire along with Lieutenant Nandre, Kelsey, and Knipps. The burning building was a two-story factory, and we had thought
that the fire below us was completely extinguished. Jim was helping us advance the hose on the second floor. We were making
slow but sure progress when we realized the floor beneath us was burning. We tried to back down the stairs, but they were
completely engulfed in flames. There was too much fire for our one hose line to control, and there was no way out. We had
to make a choice between sticking it out and hoping that other lines would appear quickly to help us out, or jumping out of
the window. Fire is fast and deadly, so we didn’t have much time to decide. I was for making it out the window, since it was
only about a twenty foot drop. Kelsey and Knipps were for sticking it out, since they were sure Engine 50 would have another
line there in a minute or two. Lieutenant Nandre had gone to the window to look things over. We looked at Jim Gin-tel, and
through the thick smoke we could see him sitting back on his haunches. We were all choking and coughing, but Jim put a cigarette
in his mouth, smiled, and said, “Anyone got a match?” Fortunately, the Chief realized where we were, and had a ladder placed
to the window before I had to think about lighting Jim’s cigarette, or keeping the fire from lighting it for him.