Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [76]
My attention is drawn to a little girl, about eleven years old, standing by the curb to the side of the firehouse. She has a pretty, round, Spanish face. Her head is lowered, but her eyes are staring up at me apprehensively. She is holding a black and white patterned notebook in one hand, similar to the kind of school pad I used as a child, and in the other hand she has a sharpened pencil. She seems to want to say something to me, but is too shy and timid to open her mouth. I walk closer to her, smiling, hoping to loosen her up.
“Hello,” I say, in as gentle a tone as I can handle, “can I help you in any way?”
She doesn’t move, and her head is still lowered in a way that reminds me of the self-consciousness and underrated self-image of poor children.
“My name is Cynthia,” she says, quietly, “and I have to write a report about firemen. Are you a fireman?”
I am standing next to her now. “Yes, I am a fireman, and I’ll be glad to help you with your report.”
She widens her mouth in a smile, and raises her head. “Are you a Chief?”
“No, I’m not a Chief, but I think I can help you anyway,” I reply. I am about to ask her if she would care to take a closer look at the fire engines, but the bells are sounded. Box 2509. Westchester Avenue and Tiffany Street.
“If you’ll wait here until we come back,” I say to her quickly, “I’ll show you around the firehouse.” It is probably a false alarm, I say to myself, and we will be gone for just a few minutes. I wave to her as the pumper rolls out of quarters, and she waves back, happy that she has made a friend.
Box 2509 is normally a false alarm, but we make the usual search up and down the block. Knipps, Royce, and Kelsey take one side of the intersection, and Carroll and I the other. This is the beginning of the “Persian Market,” the strip along Westchester Avenue, from Tiffany Street to Southern Boulevard, where the South Bronx whores hustle their bodies and mouths. Three girls are standing in the entrance of a closed hardware store. “Did you see anyone pull the alarm box?” I ask them. Not expecting an answer.
One, in a flaming red wig, says, “Honey, I ain’t got time to watch no fire alarm box. I’m in business, and I got to make money. Now if you want to talk some busnez…”
Another looks at Benny, and says, “Where you get those pretty eyes?”
Carroll and I laugh as we turn and give the thumbs-down gesture of a false alarm.
Lieutenant Welch is about to radio the “ten-ninety-two” signal over the air, but he stops as he sees the Battalion car approach. Chief Niebrock is on vacation leave, and Chief Solwin is working in his place. As Lieutenant Welch walks to the car to report a false alarm, a small boy comes running up Tiffany Street. He is yelling, “Hey firemans! Hey firemans! A man is dying in the alley.”
We get the address, and the pumper wails down the street. We push through a small crowd, and there, face up in the alleyway, is a young man, hardly a man, about nineteen years old. He is a light-skinned Puerto Rican, goateed, and wearing soiled sharkskin pants. He has been cut across the stomach, and stabbed in the heart.
I would like to turn away from him, away from such a sickening sight, but I know what I have to do. Royce and the others push the crowd back as Benny and I check his eyes and his pulse. We unbutton his shirt and take a close look at his stomach, and chest. Was he murdered by a junkie for a five dollar bag of heroin, or by a jealous husband, or by an abstraction called machismo, the uniquely Spanish need to prove virility? I’ll never know. I only know that it is too late for us to do anything for him, and I shake my head. What a waste of life. In other times this sad cadaver before me may have been the healthy son of a farmer, or a hard-working clerk, or a poet. But, fate brought him to America. His life may have been insignificant, I don’t know, but it was life nonetheless. And the South Bronx robbed