Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [80]
The old woman goes out to the apparatus floor, and both women return to the kitchen. The younger woman runs to the girl, and kisses her face over and over. The girl attempts to throw her arms around her mother, but the movement of her arms causes the glass-packed wounds to shoot her full of pain. She has let the sheet fall to her lap, and her mother picks it up and covers her.
Lieutenant Welch has entered the kitchen, along with Captain Frimes, who is working with Ladder 31. Lieutenant Welch will have to make out a report of the incident, and he questions the girl’s mother. She is a handsome woman, about forty years old, and dressed attractively in bell bottomed pants and a silk blouse. She is very upset, and her voice trembles as she speaks.
“This girl is my daughter, Jenny, and my husband tried to get in the bed with her. He was drunk, and when she tried to beat ’im away, he broke a bottle and cut her with it. I started to fight with ’im, and Jenny runned around here to the firehouse. We live around the comer on 169th Street.” The woman starts to cry, and she turns away, saying, “I jus’ been married to him for a year, and now I’m gonna kill ’im when I see ’im, for what he did to my Jenny, I swear to God, I’m gonna kill ’im.”
The police arrive, and take the necessary information from Lieutenant Welch. Billy-o tells us that the dispatcher has told him that there is a backlog of ambulance calls in the South Bronx, and we will have to wait forty-five minutes before one will arrive. The policemen decide to take the girl and her mother to the hospital in their squad car.
The girl is composed now, although still frightened. Her mother’s lover loved her, and his lust is still breathing from her shoulder and neck, and Electra must rage as she sees the wounds of passion on the smooth, dark shoulder of a South Bronx virgin. Saints have been made for less pain. And now, as I watch her bare feet walk to the police car, as I watch her body move beneath the wraps of a firehouse sheet, I can’t help thinking of Cynthia, and of all the Cynthias of the South Bronx. God, I think, God protect them!
Engine 85 returns from its run, and as the pumper begins to back into quarters, the police car wails off to the hospital. The bells ring. The pumper stops at the door, the driver, Oscar Beutin, counting the signal. Box 2738. Oscar knows that signal as well as we know the signal for Charlotte Street and 170th. The men of Engine 85 retake their positions on the back step, and the pumper takes off. Their destination: Southern Boulevard and 172nd Street.
There is a blacktopped lot on the corner of Southern Boulevard and 172nd Street. We had a block party there a couple of weeks ago, a kind of back-to-school party for the neighborhood kids. The Department’s Community Relations Bureau paid for the ice cream and soda. The men of the firehouse chaperoned.
It was a nice day, an end-of-summer day. Like the bus trip, the party was organized so that the kids could get to know the firefighters better, and the firefighters the kids. Captain Frimes of Ladder 31 did most of the work in preparing the day. He arranged with the owner of the property to use the lot, he met with the community groups, he asked the Salvation Army for the use of one of their trucks to dispense the soda and ice cream, and along with two lieutenants from the Community Relations Bureau he contracted for the entertainment with a steel band. Captian Frimes is a community-minded man.
A notice was put up on the bulletin board of the firehouse kitchen a week before, asking for volunteers to come in on their day off to meet with the kids, answer their questions, and generally add to the excitement of the party. Some of the men, predictably, said they wanted nothing to do with these kids. One said,