Report from Engine Co. 82 (29 page)

Wednesday will be much like the day before, except that I plan to work on an amendment that I want to submit to the membership
of my union for a change in our Constitution. I will take the boys to a nearby lake to swim, and because our waters should
be free to all, I will curse the money I will have to pay for the privilege. Later, I will play tennis or basketball with
friends on the courts behind the town high school. After a shower, dinner, bedtime stories for the boys, a soft hour with
my wife, I will sleep, and I will return to duty, Thursday and Friday, nine in the morning to six at night.

The powerful voice of Charlie McCartty awakens me from my wondering. “I heard three rings, men.”

I sit up in the bed, and listen for the housewatchman’s voice. It could be for Engine 85, but the command travels up the pole-hole
from the floor below: “Eighty-two and Seven-twelve. Chief goes. Fire at the corner of Home and Union.”

“So long suckers,” Charlie says as men move to the poles.

As I slide down the shining brass pole, I can hear Bill Kelsey say, “You’re just jealous it’s not for you, McCartty.”

Bill slides the pole, but Charlie’s voice, deep and raspy, follows right behind him, “Listen Sonny, I have more time sliding
this pole than you have in fires, and don’t you forget it.”

We are all laughing on the back step. Kelsey insists that Charlie would follow us down Intervale Avenue in order to have the
last word, and the chuckling continues. But as Valenzio turns the pumper up Home Street the faces on the back step become
serious. There is an abandoned one-family, wooden frame building on the comer of Union and Home, and the second floor is completely
ablaze. The fire is so intense that it has reached out and burned the overhead electrical wires in the street, and a line
lies on the sidewalk in front of the building, arching, and leaping.

There is a wooden crate in a lot beside the burning frame, and John Nixon rips a side off to lay across the exposed wire.
Chief Niebrock is here, and he orders a man to stand watch by the fallen hotline, as John rushes into the building to make
his search. But the man is more interested in the fire than babysitting over a wire, and another fireman almost steps on the
thing—500 volts strong. Fortunately, Chief Niebrock sees him, and cries a desperate warning, as I pass by dragging the hose.
The fireman, a man from Engine 50, redirects his step, and Chief Niebrock scolds the man who was assigned to stand watch.

The fire is going in three rooms, but the large amount of water pouring from the two-and-a-half-inch hose makes easy work
of it. Kelsey has the nozzle, and is moving in fast. The smoke is dark and putrid, and the inevitable mucus flows heavily
from our mouths and nostrils. Lieutenant Welch begins to cough, and realizing the effort Kelsey must be making orders Willy
Boyle to the nozzle. Knipps, Royce, and I hump the hose from behind, where the smoke is not as bad.

Kelsey bails out to the lighter air, but as he passes through the hall Kenny Hing pulls back his halligan tool to take a swing
at a rear door. Kelsey is hit with the end of the weighty, metal tool, and his eyelid opens up.

The fire in the last of the rooms is out, and the room steams. The men of Ladder 712 enter to pull the ceilings. Tony Indio
walks to the far corner of the room, but the flooring gives way. His six-foot hook flies to the ground as he tries to catch
a beam, but he isn’t quick enough, and disappears to a room below. Nixon and Mike Runyon hustle out of the room, and down
the stairs to where Tony lies.

It is eight o’clock now. Knipps is cooking breaded veal cutlets for dinner—McCartty calls them motorman’s gloves, and Boyle
calls them elephant’s ears. Kelsey is still at the hospital getting his eye stitched, and we heard that Indio has two broken
ribs.

Knipps is cooking the cutlets by threes in the deep oil fryer. As he lays three finished products into a brown-paper-lined
pan, he announces to all in the kitchen that there is just enough food for the meal, and if he catches anyone trying to steal
a piece of knosh he will cut their hand off.

“You can shove your meal,” someone remarks, but Knipps overlooks it. He has never experienced sincere gratitude for his cooking,
but thank-yous come in other ways, like “Shove it.”

I climb the stairs to the bunk room, hoping for an hour’s respite, but the bells intercede as I reach the top step, the twenty-third
step.

We are at Charlotte Street again, and it is a false alarm. The men on the back step say nothing as Chief Niebrock radios the
ten-ninety-two, the signal of a malicious false alarm. Knipps, Boyle, Royce, Valenzio, Lieutenant Welch—all of them are conditioned
to accepting false alarms as a way of life, like climbing into pants in the morning, or stopping at an intersection for a
red light. Things that must be done. False alarms that must be answered. But will it ever stop? Almost ninety thousand of
them last year in this town, and the number rises from year to year. I am enraged. I won’t accept them as part of the job,
not until the courts decide to send even a virgin child to jail for the malicious act. If a judge and his family were immolated
in a downtown fire because firefighters were answering a false alarm elsewhere, then the judiciary would think of false alarms
as a problem. But, it never happens that way. It happens here in the South Bronx, where people are poor, and not important
enough to be concerned about.

Calm. Be calm, I tell myself. There are less tragic hypotheses to make. Think about the wear and tear of the pumper’s tires,
and the cost of diesel fuel. Think about a burned and forgotten roast smoking in an oven, or a sparking chimney, or an overflowing
bathtub. Things less serious than death.

I am looking at the bunkroom ceiling again, but I don’t bother to count the nails. I close my eyes. Each minute’s rest seems
like an hour of sleep. It is eleven o’clock, and I have an hour before I begin housewatch duty.

We almost ate the elephant’s ears uninterrupted, but a woman stopped by in passing, and told of a garbage fire around the
corner. Lieutenant Welch called the dispatcher, and we took it as a single unit call. The men of Ladder 712 were satisfied
that we would extinguish the fire before someone pulled the alarm box, saving them a response. The pumper has left quarters
seven times since we were at Charlotte Street. Three were false alarms. Two were abandoned cars, derelict, stolen, and stripped,
and two were garbage fires,
“outside rubbish”
as they are called on the fire report.

Engine 85 and Ladder 712 caught a job on Longfellow Avenue. They were washing dishes and cleaning pots as the alarm came in.
Chief Niebrock transmitted a second alarm on arrival, when he saw three frame houses afire. Fire in wooden frame buildings
spreads like a fire on a dry prairie, and the flames soon grew to three-alarm intensity. But they held it to a third. Eighty-five
will be there most of the night, and Seven-twelve will go off duty at twelve-thirty, their tour completed.

The hour passes quickly. I do not sleep, but the sixty minutes of inaction purges the fatigue and gives me new energy. Vinny
Royce’s voice echoes from the apparatus floor, “You got it, Dennis.” I arise swiftly, and slide to the floor below. It’s time
to begin my housewatch duty—three hours of recording bell transmissions, and answering telephones. From midnight to 3:00
A.M.

Vinny picks up a pack of cigarettes from the housewatch desk, smiles an appreciation of relief, and heads for the kitchen,
free from the confinement of the housewatch area. I sit at the desk, the eighteen-inch department journal in front of me.
The last entry logged in the book was
“Engine 82 and Ladder 712 in service from Box 2700—MFA”
(malicious false alarm). Directly under it I write the time in the margin: 2400 hours, midnight in military time. Next to
the time I write,
“Fireman Smith relieved Fireman Royce at housewatch. Department property, apparatus, and quarters in good condition.”
I don’t know for sure that anything is in good condition, but the department regulations mandate the entry. If anything is
stolen or broken now, everyone but me is covered. I am responsible for the next three hours, until I yell to Willy Knipps,
“You got it, Willy,” and Willy puts his name in the book.

There is nothing to do now, but read and wait for the alarms to come in. In the desk drawer there is a book of Ellery Queen
mysteries. I start to read it, but my eyes begin to strain at the second paragraph. I replace it in the drawer, reflecting
unhappily that my eyes are not as strong as they used to be. I am still a young man, but I am beginning to sense a feeling
of agedness and weariness. This is a young man’s job, but it’s making me old. I am thirty-one years old, and at times I feel
fifty.

The South Bronx has taught me much about people, about misery and deprivation of all kinds, but I have paid well for the lesson.
I live a five-day week, and chalk the other two up for rest and recuperation. The day after my day-tours and the day after
my night-tours do not belong to me, but to the South Bronx, to the false alarms and the garbage fires.

I am tired, yet I don’t want to transfer to a middle-class neighborhood, where false alarms are surprising, and garbage is
piled neatly in cans. Not yet. I still feel I have something to give where it is most needed. I am a professional firefighter,
I know my work, and the South Bronx needs men like me, Royce, Carroll, McCartty, O’Mann, and the rest. We have developed the
necessary mixture of moxie, skill, and self-reliance that makes us firefighters, and gives us the responsibility to protect
where people are victimized most. It took us years to develop that combination of skills that permits us to challenge the
unknown of fire, to crawl breathlessly into a whirling darkness, a deadly nightshade of smoke, knowing all the while that
the floor or the ceiling may collapse, yet confident of victory, assured that only we can do the job. We, New York’s front
line of defense, will get the job done. Firefighters. New York’s Bravest. Anyone can be President, the nuns taught us that;
but they were wrong about firefighters. It takes more than study and hard work to be a firefighter. Sometimes it takes more
than anyone has to give.

The bells start to ring. I brace myself attentively, and write the signal in the journal.
“Received telegraph alarm, Box 2291
. I open the drawer labeled Alarm Assignment Cards, and finger the cards until I come to 2291. The location is Prospect Avenue
and 153rd Street. The first alarm assignment reads
“Engine 73, Engine 41, Squad 2, Ladder 42, and Ladder 17.”
Engine 85 is assigned on the second alarm, and Ladder 31 is assigned on the third. I holler through the apparatus floor,
“Okaaay,” and return to my thoughts.

No, I don’t want to transfer from Engine 82. I have grown to love the men I work with as much as any man can love another.
We have been through much together—from being caught between an extended fire, huddled on the floor, flames jumping before
and behind, and unsure if we would be able to fight our way out, to consoling each other in hospital emergency wards, to drinking
hard in the North Bronx bars, hard, like the sun wouldn’t rise again, to picnicking with our families by a calm upstate lake.
Between us there is a mutual admiration and concern that can only be found among men whose very lives depend on each other’s
quick, competent, and courageous actions. It is a good feeling, this dependency, a proud feeling.

The harsh clang of the bells makes me jump, and I poise for the count—Onetwo onetwothreefourfive one onetwothree. I record
the signal in the book as I yell “Get out Eighty-two and Thirty-one. Box 2513. Prospect Avenue and 165th Street.” The telephone
rings the three short rings that indicate added information. The dispatcher gives me an address, and I relay the information
to Lieutenant Welch.

The troops are already standing on the back step, and I have to hustle to put my gear on. The pumper begins to move out, and
I take a running jump to catch it. Knipps and Royce reach out to grab me as I land.

Ladder 31 is behind us as we reach the Prospect Avenue address. Lieutenant Welch runs into the building, as we begin to drag
the hose from the pumper-bed. There is no excitement, no discernible fire or smoke, but we stretch the hose just in case.

Billy-o and McCartty are on the fouth floor. Billy-o has his halligan tool wedged between the door and its frame. McCartty
is whacking the end of the halligan with the base of his ax-head. The noise has awakened the neighbors, and the building becomes
a chorus of excited, questioning people.

Richie Rittman goes through the alleyway to the rear yard. There is a girl, about ten years old, lying on the rough concrete,
her face distorted by pain. Richie begins to kneel by her, but he hears screaming from above—the high-pitched desperate screams
of children. Richie knows his job is not to comfort this girl. Not now.

There is an iron gate on the fire-escape window on the fourth floor. Next to the fire escape is another window, but it is
too far to reach. Three little boys are leaning over the sill, gasping for air, and crying fearfully. Thick smoke is pushing
out of their apartment, over their small anguished heads, and between them. “Just stay right where you are boys, I’ll get
you out,” Richie yells, over and over.

The fire-escape window is broken, and Richie forces the iron gate open. It takes all his strength before the brackets snap.
Behind the gate there is a chest of drawers. Richie kicks it over, and enters the room.

The room is hot, the fire from the adjoining rooms is beginning to sweep in. The boys are in shock, and they don’t want to
leave the window. Richie picks two of them up and carries them to the fire escape. As he returns for the third, he can hear
me open the nozzle at the front of the apartment—first the air gush, and then the powerful stream of water.

There are three rooms going, and we have to get on our bellies to escape the ever-lowering heat. We push in, Lieutenant Welch
saying “Beautiful, we almost got it, just a little more,” all the while, and Royce just behind humping the hose, saying “If
you need a blow Dennis, I’m right here.” I can feel the heat sink into my face, like a thousand summer days at the beach.
We reach the third room, and the fire is extinguished, defeated, dead. The smoke lifts, and the walls breathe the last breaths
of steam.