Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [74]
“I got burned on the neck.”
“Back out,” Lieutenant Welch says.
“No, I can make it. Just look for my helmet on the floor.” Burns are funny things. After the initial pain, they stop hurting until a few days afterward. I really feel I can make it in a little more, but Benny climbs alongside of me and takes the nozzle. Vinny moves up, and I climb over him toward the hall door. My face feels flushed with the heat, and my nose is running over my mouth. As I reach the vestibule door, the soggy Fox Street air wraps around my face, and I take a heavy, refreshing inhalation. But I remember that I left my helmet in the fire. It cost me twenty-eight bucks, and I don’t want to lose it under fallen plaster and lath.
Willy Knipps and Bill Kelsey, their masks donned, pass me. They are rushing into the fire, and don’t notice me behind them. “Hey Willy,” I yell, “tell Carroll to look for my helmet.” Knipps turns, and seems surprised to see me in the hall, but he says “O.K.” and enters the apartment on his knees. The smoke is banking down now, and rushing for the oxygen at the door. I start to cough, and crouch low to get beneath it, but the smoke follows me down. What, I ask myself, am I doing here. I return to the street, and sit on the fender of the derelict car—just where I sat when I saw Tina this morning. Firemen are racing past me, either dragging hose or carrying hooks and halligan tools. The street is filled with hose—like arteries on a highway map. Sirens are wailing the arrival of second alarm companies.
I put my gloves in the pocket of my rubber coat, and feel the back of my neck. The blisters have risen across the full length of my neck, and I can feel the rough surface of the paint still sticking to the swollen skin. It doesn’t hurt at all, but it will be tough moving my head for the next few weeks.
Benny and Vinny appear, dripping wet, in the doorway of the abandoned tenement. Benny has my helmet in his hand. There is nothing for me to do now but wait for an ambulance to come.
9
EVERY fourth year or so the city’s Department of Personnel gives notice that the filing period for the fireman’s examination is open. I read such a notice yesterday, and the ten years that have passed since I read the first one disappeared. I have been a firefighter for over eight years, but I remember the day I filed for the exam as clearly as a king remembers his coronation, or a cardinal his elevation.
It was a September day, much like this day, and the heat of summer was beginning to wane. The winter lay ahead, but I felt that somehow the coming winter, and all the future winters of my life, would be less harsh once I became a firefighter. Yes, I would be a firefighter, and for the first time in my life I saw the brightness of stability and security.
There were no flowering trees to see as I walked the seven concrete blocks from the tenement I called home to the Lexington Avenue subway. But, as I passed the firehouse on East Fifty-first Street I felt the excitement a poet might feel upon viewing an acre of exploding crocus. The doors were open, and the apparatus stood poised and ready for the charge. There was a chromed numeral attached to the front grill of the pumper, but as I looked at the number I saw instead William Carlos Williams' “figure 5 in gold.” I was ecstatic that I would soon be a part of the gong clangs and siren howls. I would play to the cheers of excited hordes, climbing ladders, pulling hose, and saving children—always saying children—from the waltz of the hot-masked devil. I paused and fed the fires of my ego. I would be a firefighter, part of this great red whirl. Tearful mothers would embrace me, editorial writers would extol me in heroic phrases, and mayors would pin medals and ribbons to my breast.
As I stood there I wished that an alarm would rock the firehouse, and men would slide, fly, down the flashy, gleaming poles, jump into their folded-down hip boots, and amid great excitement be off in answer to a call of distress.