Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [6]
The truckmen are finished with their overhauling work, and Vinny gives the rooms a last spray. We drain the hose, repack it, and head back to the firehouse. It is near six o’clock now, and the brightness of the day begins to invade the South Bronx.
In the kitchen again. The men haven’t bothered to wash up, and they sit before their steaming cups of coffee, with smoke-and mucus-stained faces. They are talking about the ironic justice of the fire, although they don’t call it ironic justice but “tough shit.” None of us want to see anyone killed, but there is a sad kind of “it’s either you or me” irony here. We remember all the obvious torch jobs we have been called into, all the vacant buildings, the linoleum placed over holes in the floor so the firefighters would fall to the floor below, the people killed in the rooms above a fire because the tenant below had a fight with his wife and set the place up, and the burns, cuts, and broken limbs we have suffered because of them. Any one of us could have been killed in that fire. But it was the arsonists who were killed this time.
Willy Knipps comes into the kitchen, and I remember Vinny Royce washing the vomit from my coat and boots. I had forgotten about it, but Vinny noticed it and put the nozzle on me, washing me clean. Ordinarily I would say something funny about this, something like, “Hey, Knipps, next time you go into a fire bring a bucket with you. Huh?” But I’m too tired.
It was four days later that Benny Carroll asked me, “Did you hear about the fire we had the other night, the one where the two kids were killed?”
“I was there, Benny, don’t you remember?”
“I don’t mean it that way, dummo, I mean about the investigation.”
“No. Tell me about it.”
“Well, the marshals were here last night, and told the story. It seems that the landlord wanted that apartment vacant, and he knew that the people wouldn’t be there that night. So he hired some guy to torch the place. The guy then hires the three kids to light it up, and when they were in there spreading the gasoline the guy threw a match in and locked the door on them. They’re looking for the guy now for a double murder. It looks like the kid Captain Frimes got out is gonna live.”
Benny was going to continue with the story, but the bells came in. Now I am on the back step of the pumper, and thinking that it wasn’t ironic justice at all. It’s what always happens in the South Bronx. The real devil gets away without a burn, and the children of the South Bronx are the victims.
2
MY name is Dennis Smith, and I’m a New York City fireman—one of New York’s bravest. “New York’s bravest,” that’s what the writers of newspaper editorials call us. There are almost eight million people in this city, and twelve thousand of us are firemen. We are different from the rest of the people who work in this town: bankers, ad-men, truck drivers, secretaries, sellers and buyers, all have a high degree of assurance that they will return home from work in the evening the same way they left in the morning—on their feet. A little tired perhaps, but on their feet. Firemen are never sure. When a fireman’s wife kisses him as he leaves for work, she makes a conscious wish that he will return to her. She hopes that she will not have to make those fast, desperate arrangements for a baby-sitter so that she can visit him in the hospital, and each time the doorbell rings she hopes that there will not be a chief, a chaplain, and a union official there, all coming to say kind things about her husband, how good he was, how dedicated, how brave.
I’m part of Engine Company 82. The firehouse I work out of is on Intervale Avenue and 169th Street in a ghetto called the South Bronx. Of the three biggest ghettos in New York City, the South Bronx is the least talked about. You’ve heard of Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell came from Harlem; and you may have heard of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Shirley Chisholm comes from Bedford-Stuyvesant. Nobody you’ve ever heard of comes from the South Bronx.
Around the corner from the firehouse is the Forty-first