Report from Engine Co. 82 (14 page)

One moming the investigator came. I was sitting at the kitchen table, which my mother had covered with the left-over linoleum
from the kitchen floor. I was eating cereal, and my older brother was across the room from me, bathing in the kitchen tub.
My mother was sitting in the living room reading a magazine—she always read a lot—when the knock on the kitchen door came.
My brother left his bath quickly, because you don’t lie lazily and relax when the bathtub is in the kitchen, and my mother
adjusted the television bedspread before going to answer the door. She put her hand on the painted doorknob, then paused for
a moment as if she remembered something. She turned, and looked briefly into the medicine-cabinet mirror hanging above the
kitchen sink, turning her head from side to side and patting her hairdo. She adjusted her housecoat, and opened the door.
There, standing in the unlighted hall was the welfare investigator. His face was black.

What’s he doing in this neighborhood? Suppose someone saw him knocking at this door. What would they think? They would find
out that we were on welfare. The news would get around, and my friends would do a job on me. I would be ridiculed, and I would
have to fight my way out of any dirty remark. Why did they have to send this guy? What happened to Mr. Feeney, the regular
investigator?

My brother dressed, and left the house. I went into our room, squeezed past the chest-of-drawers, and climbed up to the top
bunk bed to read my collection of
Hot Rod
magazines. I tried to listen to the conversation that was flowing over the kitchen table, but the voices were low, and I
couldn’t hear. Instead, I looked at pictures of bullnosed ’49 Fords.

After a short while, the investigator left, and I jumped down from the top bunk. My mother told me his name was Mr. Fogey,
which I thought a strange name for someone who wasn’t Irish. She said he was a much nicer man than Mr. Feeney. He was recommending
extra money for us so that we could buy coats for the coming winter, and he didn’t even bother to look through the rooms.

The boys of Home Street have disappeared with their bicycles, and twilight has become the dark of night. It is seven-thirty,
and we have had only one run, a false alarm, since I started work at five-thirty. I am glad that it is slow—surprisingly slow
for such warm weather—because today is the day after Saint Patrick’s Day, a day of recuperation for many New Yorkers. Yesterday
I played the bagpipes with the Fire Department Emerald Society Pipe Band, my kilt swaying in the wind as we marched up Fifth
Avenue. After the parade we went bar-hopping down Lexington Avenue. The bars were overcrowded and turning people away, but
always ready to receive a bagpiper and his friends on March 17th. Give the firemen a drink on me, a hundred voices would say,
and ask the piper to play “Scotland the Brave.”

“Not on Saint Patrick’s Day. I won’t play that, but 111 play the Garry Owen for yas,” I say, “and O’Donnel Abu.”

We talked to girls named Jablonski and Bluestein, their hair dyed green for the day, and to a Hawaiian bartender who wore
a Kiss-Me-I’m-Irish button. A pretty black copy-writer explained to me how things would have been different in Ireland had
Wolfe Tone been able to muster the soldiers in France for the ’98 rebellion. It was a day of surprises and free booze. A young
girl in a Forty-seventh Street bar lifted my kilt when I refused to tell her what I was wearing under it. I let it go, but
a few minutes later when I lifted her skirt to her shoulders she took great offense.

“What’s good for the goose…,” I told her. “Go ask Women’s Lib.”

By midnight I was exhausted and hiccoughing, and I took a cab to my mother’s apartment for a night’s rest.

Captain Albergray walks down the stairs from the second floor. “Everybody in the kitchen for company drill,” he says.

Benny Carroll has suppered on aspirins and Alka-Seltzers, still suffering from “It’s-a-great-day-for-the-Irish.” He holds
his hands to his head, and says, “Listen, Captain, let’s not do anything too strenuous, if we can avoid it.”

“Ya can’t expect to wallow with the pigs one day, and soar with the eagles the next,” Captain Albergray says. Benny laughs,
and we walk to the kitchen for the hour drill period.

The members of Ladder 712 and Ladder 31 are sitting around a kitchen table, their attention focused on Billy O’Mann who has
just announced that he has something interesting to say. He has a newspaper clipping in one hand, and a cup of coffee in the
other.

“Listen to this,” he says, waving the oblong piece of paper. “Yesterday, while all the brothers were enjoying themselves at
the parade, Engine 82 had four rubbish fires, one right after another, up in Crotona Park. Each time they would put the fire
out, and each time they left, the kids would light up another trash can. Lieutenant Nandre was working, ya know, and he was
really pissed when they left here for the fourth time. So he gets to the park and sees the cans on fire. There were fifty
kids around, but of course nobody knew who lit the fire. The guys in the engine stretch the booster line, and Lieutenant Nandre
gets on the radio to report the fire. Get this. He says, Eighty-two Engine to the Bronx. We have another rubbish fire here
at 2745, and one engine company is sufficient. Additional information: Upon arrival, he says, we found a squirrel overcome
with smoke. One of the members revived the squirrel and it’s now running around Crotona Park playing with its nuts.”

There is a lot of chuckling, but Jerry Herbert doesn’t believe it.

“C’mon, Bill,” he says.

“So help me Christ,” Billy says, “that’s what he said.” Billy-o holds up the newspaper clipping and waves it in front of everyone.
“And a reporter must have been monitoring the fire calls, because the story is right here, out of one of the biggest newspapers
in the world.” I walk over to take a closer look at the clipping, and the headline reads, sure enough,
BRONX FIREMAN REVIVES
DYING SQUIRREL.

Captain Albergray interrupts the laughter, and the story, by yelling, “Hey Jerry, shut the television off, will ya. It’s drill
time.”

As Jerry turns the switch, Lieutenant Lierly enters the kitchen, and says quietly, for the noise has toned down, “Ladder 31,
on the apparatus floor.”

Jerry, Billy-o, Dulland, McCartty, and Tom Leary head for the door. Ordinarily, we would drill together, but Lieutenant Lierly
wants to train with the new power saw that was recently issued to Ladder 31.

Engine 85 is operating at a deep-seated rubbish fire out at Hunts Point—an East Bronx industrial area, filled with junk yards
and automobile graveyards. The trash is piled high in Hunts Point. Small contractors pay someone, although no one knows who,
to drop their truckloads of refuse in the vacant streets by the bay. Or they drop their loads without prearrange-ment, but
they’re always ready to part with a fifty-dollar bill if caught—small-scale graft that ends inevitably in hard work for firefighters.
We know that Engine 85 will be out there for a few hours, pouring water on heaps of smoldering garbage, hoping the water will
sink through and extinguish the fire.

Captain Albergray opens his worn, three-ring binder of training bulletins on the kitchen table. Lieutenant Coughlin of Ladder
712 sits beside him at the table, and we gather around them in a semicircle, sitting on armless chairs, or tables. Captain
Albergray speaks.

“All the companies of the 27th Battalion are due for evaluation in the next few weeks. Now, the officers from the Bureau of
Training are tough, and very little gets by them. You either know the stuff, or you don’t. We, as firefighters, know that
we are responsible for a lot more than extinguishing fire, and the evaluation officer can pick questions from reams of technical
information. We don’t know what they will ask, but I’m confident that we will have the right answers. In any case, we will
review as much as we can during our drill periods for the next few weeks.”

The men are uneasy in their chairs. They, as I, would rather drill on fire tactics or rescue procedures—and the interesting,
exciting stories that invariably arise. But, the department requires that we know as much about a hose or a rope as a soldier
knows about his rifle. A two-and-a-half-inch cotton jacketed fifty-foot length of hose weighs 71 pounds, and when filled with
water weighs 178 pounds. The roof-rope we use in rescues is 150 feet, weighs 40 pounds, and is made by turning South American
hemp fibers into yarn, twisting the yam into strands, and braiding three strands into rope thirteen-sixteenths of an inch
in diameter. Yes, it is going to be a boring drill period.

“Well talk about the Scott Air-Pac first,” Captain Albergray says. “We use this mask daily, and we should know its specifications.”

“I use my car daily, and I don’t know its specifications,” I say to Benny, low enough not to be overheard.

“Cosmo, how much air does the cylinder contain?”

“In pounds or in cubic feet?” Cosmo asks.

“Both.”

“There are 1980 pounds air pressure, or forty point three cubic feet.”

“Okay. Benny, what is the cylinder tested at?”

“At 3000 pounds air pressure.” Benny is studying chemical reactions, and this answer seems simple for him.

“Okay. Royce, what does the Air-Pac weigh?”

“Thirty pounds,” Vinny answers.

“All we should know about that is,” I can’t help saying, “that the thing is too damn heavy and cumbersome, and the department
has the responsibility to buy a better one.”

“That may be right, Dennis,” Captain Albergray says, slightly annoyed, “but the evaluation officer would call it a wrong answer.”

The arm on the wall bell begins to move. The box sounds out: 2544. Saved by the bell. Everyone moves out, through the kitchen
door, past the members of Ladder 31 sitting on their heels around a power saw, and climbs on fire engines while throwing shoes
to the side of the apparatus floor. Willy Knipps is on housewatch, and yelling, “Kelly Street and one six seven,” as he runs
to the pumper.

The pumper stops at the comer of Kelly Street. A small boy says something to Captain Albergray and runs ahead. We follow him
into an alleyway between two six-story tenements. At the end of the alley, in the backyard of one of the tenements, is a two-story
frame building. The house is ramshackle, paint peeling from its splitting wooden sideboards, a step missing from its porch
stairs. Caught in a circle of towering dwellings, the house is a reminder of the Bronx past, when the land was zoned for two-story
multiple dwellings.

Inside, a mother is surrounded by the young boy and four smaller children. Their clothes are stained, and torn, and remind
me of an illustration from a book of Dickens' stories my mother used to read to me. The mother does not speak English, and
she points with some confusion to the interior of the apartment.

“She means the bathroom,” the boy says.

There is a bedspring and a mattress in the living room, and a television set sits on the floor. That’s all—a makeshift couch,
striped and buttoned, and a T.V.

We pass the bedroom. In it there are three beds, all without head- or footboards. There is no other furniture, only a large
carton filled with clothes, pushed between a bed and the wall. “
THIS SIDE UP
” it says on the side of the carton, with an arrow pointing to the ceiling. It would be called Pop Art in a rich man’s home.

The kitchen is large, the walls patched with old, unpainted plaster. In the middle of the room there is a square wooden table,
only slightly larger than a card table, painted white. Standing on either side of it is a straight-back chair, with carved
legs unlike the legs of the table. The only two chairs in the apartment.

The kitchen floor is covered with large puddles of water. The tenant in the apartment above must have left the bathtub water
running, and dozed off, or left the house, because the water is falling heavily from the bathroom ceiling and the pipe recesses.
Lieutenant Coughlin sends two men from Ladder 712 to check out the apartment upstairs. Chief Niebrock, a gentleman always,
excuses himself past the firemen gathered in the kitchen and looks about the bathroom. He studies the condition of the ceiling,
and the light fixture. There is no hazard—only a mass of water that will certainly buckle the linoleum on the bathroom and
kitchen floors.

The boy is standing next to me. He is wearing rubber shower clogs, and the water flows above the thin bottoms to wash his
feet.

“How long have you been living here?” I ask him. He looks down at his feet, instead of up at me, and I am sorry I asked the
question.

“Since Christmas,” he answers, his voice low and unsure.

The men of Ladder 712 return from the floor above. They report to the Chief. The apartment upstairs was empty, but the door
was open. The tub was running full force above the safety drain. They locked the door on the way out. The Chief gives the
order to “Take up.” Going through the rooms again I notice that there is not a single thing, no picture, mirror, or calendar,
on the walls. It is all so desperately bare.

It is eight o’clock, and the space on the apparatus floor reserved for Engine 85 is still empty. The men of Ladder 31 are
still examining the intricacies of the power saw—the nuances of engineering that they understand better than I.

There is still time for a half-hour drill, and we sit around the table again. Captain Albergray takes his place beside Lieutenant
Coughlin.

“We’ll try it again,” he says. “Dennis, explain the procedure to be used if the regulator of the Air-Pac malfunctions.”

I am about to answer, but I am conditioned to be quiet as the bells come in. Box 2738. The men of Ladder 712 respond, but
we are safe. That is Engine 85’s box. I begin to answer again, but stop when the telephone sounds three short rings.

“Take it in Eighty-two,” Willy Knipps yells. In less than thirty seconds we are responding to 2738, Southern Boulevard and
172nd Street. Dammit, I knew that answer cold too. If you don’t get enough air into the face piece, turn the bypass valve
away from the body. The red valve. Then turn the knurled nut of the regulator. And the regulator valve. The yellow one. I
wish I had known the answer that cold when we were in the cellar of that plastics factory. The smoke was gravy-thick, and
we couldn’t find the fire. We kept pushing in through the deadly atmosphere. Suddenly, I couldn’t draw air, only an odd sucking
sound. I started to rip my face piece off, but remembered where I was. I could make out all right in an ordinary fire, in
ordinary smoke, but this plastic stuff is hard to take for more than twenty seconds. I remember thinking, red valve first?
Yellow first? Like I was taking an exam. I dropped the hose, and turned both simultaneously.