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By Root 684 0

lift a smoldering mattress, just as they scurried between the tin soldiers on the battlefield of my living-room oilcloth. As a child, I would shiver and run from them as I do now, but I was just fearful of them then; now, I resent them. More than anything, they represent poverty to me. More than anything, they are the one aspect of my youth that I was forced to accept—the ugly, brown, quick-darting companions of the poor. My mother would whisper that she cleaned and sprayed, but it didn’t help much because they were put in the walls by the builders many years ago, because they had a grudge against the Irish and the Italians. And, anyway, no matter what she sprayed around, the little creatures would learn to enjoy it. I learned that they could be fought, but not defeated. I, as they, adapted.

The July sun is now directly over the firehouse, and it seems as if it is as close to the earth as it has ever been. It is almost noon, and I am lying on a bed thinking of the fire we have just come from. The tenement on Fox Street was recently abandoned, and the day’s heat penetrated the garbage piled in the center hall so that the odor was worse than I had ever experienced. I couldn’t hold my breath long enough as I climbed over it, dragging the hose behind, and the smell made my stomach turn. The fire was on the fourth floor, and routine. Only two rooms were going, and Willy Knipps advanced the nozzle easily. When the fire was out, and the smoke cleared from the apartment, I noticed the roaches on every wall of every room but the burned ones. They were on the floor and the walls of the long, narrow hallway. I told Willy, and Benny, and Lieutenant Welch that since there was not much to do I would wait in the street until Chief Niebrock gave us the word to take up.

The garbage smell rose through the stairwell, and there was no escaping it on the trip down. In the street again, I felt a strange sense of freedom, like being released from years of penal servitude. I stood in front of the building, not knowing where to go or what to do, yet profoundly relieved, and happy that I was no longer where I had been. I felt curiously fresh in the hot, muggy air of Fox Street.

The air ducts above me purr smoothly, and the cool air blankets the sixteen beds in the bunkroom. The floors are clean, the walls newly painted, and the beds tightly made and lined symmetrically. The second floor of the firehouse reminds me of an army barracks—it’s a place to rest. But even as I lie here I think of the tenements of Fox Street. The fire we just fought tired me, and the sucking temperature exhausted me as I uncoupled, drained, and repacked the hose. I want to rest. Relax. I light a cigarette, and choke on the first drag. If I were a policeman, a plumber, a schoolteacher, or a businessman I would quit the ugly habit. But why quit smoking when each fire I fight is more deadly than a thousand cartons of Pall Mall’s. Smoke. Relax. The day is half over. But, I can’t relax. I think instead about the tenements of Fox Street, the people of Fox Street, and Tina deVega.

Tina deVega is eighteen years old. She was bom in Puerto Rico, and came to this country with her mother and three sisters and four brothers when she was a child of six. Tina doesn’t know much about the South Bronx. She doesn’t know that the detective squad working around the corner in the Simpson Street Station House investigates more homicides each month than any other squad in the city. She doesn’t know that the men in the firehouse three blocks away—my firehouse—respond to more false alarms, and fight more fires than anywhere else. She doesn’t know that the V.D. rate, and the infant mortality rate, is three times greater than that of any other section of the city. What Tina knows is that she is a five dollar trick, and lately she’s been forced to go for four. Times are tough, and even the whores on Southern Boulevard feel the inflation bite. The Boulevard is busy with girls, but there aren’t enough slow-cruising Ford sedans and Chevrolet station wagons to go around. Even the tired forty-year-olds