Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [46]
“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,