Report from Engine Co. 82 (27 page)

Cosmo and Kevin have carried children down from the second floor. In the street again, the children are delivered into the
warm arms of neighbors. The fire whips around the center hall of the ground floor, and the men of Engine 85 have moved out
to the vestibule. George Hiegman must be having trouble with the hydrant. Did someone hacksaw off the controlling stem for
a quarter’s worth of brass, or shove beer cans or soda bottles down the casing?

I look expectantly for Ladder 31, but they haven’t arrived yet. Benny has returned to the fire escape, and I follow quickly.
The people on the street shout about children being left behind on the fourth floor. Benny goes in one window, and I go in
another. The smoke is heavy now throughout the building. I am in a living room. A cheap print framed in plastic hangs on the
wall. It looks like a western sunset. I look under the vinyl-covered furniture. There are two bedrooms, and I look under the
beds, and in the closets. My eyes are wet, and my nose is running, but the kitchen and the bathroom are clear—there are no
unconscious bodies, or frightened whimpering children.

I return to the fire escape. I am not sure now if I should continue to search the building, or go down to the street and stretch
a second line to the floor above the fire. The decision is made for me as I see Ladder 31 careening up Intervale Avenue. Ladder
48 is right behind them. The “’truckies” will now search and ventilate the building. I head down the fire escape thinking
again about fire. It was going good, and the chances are that it has probably gotten through to the floor above. As I reach
the top of the drop-ladder 1 hear Benny’s voice calling for me. He is coming down the fire escape with a small girl in his
arms. I meet him between the first and second landing. “Take her down for me, Dennis,” he says. “I found her in her crib.
I’m going back up.” His face is black with smoke, and a heavy cylinder of mucus hangs from his nose. The child is crying,
which is a good sign.

There is a woman waiting at the bottom of the ladder. She is shrieking hysterically “Maria, Maria.” Another woman holds her
shoulders as she takes the baby from me. I can see through her tears the happiness in her simple, unadorned eyes—that true
happiness that is unique in a mother’s love for her child. She doesn’t know Benny, and I wonder if she will ever think of
him. pray for him.

Lieutenant Collins, Cosmo, and Kevin are in the street taking orders from Chief Niebrock. The Chief’s walkie-talkie is blaring
and squawking, and the transmission is broken up. The only words that are understandable are
“roof,”
and
“the bulkhead door.”
The Chief speaks into the transmitter in his slow, confident way,
“Please repeat ijour message. You are coming in broken up.”
And the radio just squeals in reply.

The Chief looks at Lieutenant Collins and the rest of us. Engine 45 has already started a second line to the floor above,
and Chief Niebrock orders us to help them with the stretch. The second line should have been ours, but we have all been thinking
about other things. Lieutenant Collins, Cosmo, and Kevin helped carry people down the fire escapes, and they searched the
apartments on the lower floors. Now, we will have to help Engine 45 stretch its line without getting a real piece of the action.
We’ll just squat in the hall as Engine 45 fights its way in with the nozzle.

Engine 85 is making good progress with its line. Marty Hannon and Jim Barrett are on the nozzle. They are in the apartment,
but they haven’t made the front room yet, and the fire is still pushing out of the windows. Bill Robbie is right behind them
with a mask, but Marty and Jim won’t take a blow. Captain Konak is beside them yelling the traditional words of confidence.
“Beautiful, Marty, you got it. Move in a little more. Give us some more line Robbie.”

Benny has gone into an apartment on the fifth floor. He makes a careful search, but the apartment is empty. He opens the hall
door, and he is hit with a hard wind of heat. He drops to the floor, and the heat passes over him. The smoke is thicker than
he has ever experienced it, and he coughs almost uncontrollably. His first impulse is to get back out to the fire escape and
air, but he puts his nose to the linoleum floor and tries to relax. As his coughing stops he can hear soft moaning coming
from the hall. He listens carefully for the direction, and it seems to be coming from the landing between the top floor and
the roof. He crawls on his stomach through the hall, and up the stairs. The heat is unbearable and he feels that all energy
has been drained from his body. He reaches the landing, and sees before him an incredible mess of human beings. They are piled
on top of one another, and some are thinking the last conscious thoughts of life while exhaling the sighs of death.

The landing is an inferno. There are seven people—five adults and two children—lying there. They tried to flee the burning
building, and they went to the roof door. But the roof door was chained closed to keep the drug addicts from entering from
the roof, and the heat from a fire five floors beneath them had nowhere to go. And seven human beings lay there with the heat,
before a chained bulkhead door.

Benny can hear the desperate thump of the axhead hitting the halligan tool as he grabs for the nearest body. A two-inch hole
was cut into the bulkhead brick and into the steel-covered door, and the chain was run through both holes, bound by a lock
on the inside. The links are heavy, and the firemen on the roof cannot break them. They work instead on the hinges.

Benny has a two-year-old girl in his arms again, but this one isn’t breathing. He carries her down into a fifth-floor apartment.
He closes the door behind to keep out the smoke, and lays the girl gently on the kitchen floor. He wants to give her mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation, but he has to think also of the others on the landing. He blows two hard, hopeful puffs of breath into the
girl’s mouth, and returns to the landing. There is a large woman there, made even larger with a pregnancy. He grabs her under
the arms and pulls, but she is heavy and Benny is sweating a last resurgence of power. He is pulling hard, but it is of no
consequence. He is close to collapse, and gasping with the heat and smoke. Then, like a
deus ex machina
redemption, he feels an arm swing around him, grabbing the woman’s arm. Artie Merritt has vented from the roof, and seeing
the door chained he came down the fire escape from the roof to search the floor. He and Benny drag the woman down the stairs.
She is still breathing, but badly burned. They leave her next to the baby in the kitchen and return to the landing. Artie
cannot control a coughing seizure, but he partially lifts a man, and drags him down the stairs. As Benny lifts the other child
the bulkhead door swings open, and hangs down, caught by the chain. The heat and smoke rush out to the midday air, and the
firemen fight their way down the stairs. Benny and Artie know now that the worst is over, and they minister to the people
whose lives were worth more than their own.

Engine 45 is in the apartment extinguishing the fire that has come up through the walls. We are waiting in the hall, but we
know that the men of Engine 45 won’t need us to relieve them. Kevin, Cosmo, and I follow Lieutenant Collins to the street,
where he confers with Chief Niebrock. The Chief wants us to make a secondary search of all the apartments in the building.

As we re-enter the building a man stumbles out. He is burned on the face, and bleeding heavily from the mouth. A large black
man, he is wearing a light cotton shirt that is now red with blood, and he has only one shoe. He falls in front of us, and
I catch him before he hits the ground. The others go in the building, and I stay with the man.

About fifteen minutes have gone by, and I have tried to clean the man as best I could. I used my handkerchief until Oscar
Beutin, one of the men of Engine 85, brought me a wet towel. The inside of his mouth is gashed. He must have fallen down the
stairs. I have loosened his belt, and placed my boot under his head as a pillow. The man is not in any real danger, at least
as far as I can tell, and I try to make him as comfortable as possible. A call has been put in for ambulances, and they should
be here soon.

A large crowd has gathered in front of the building. One man is agitated, and he shouts, “Why don’t you put that man in a
fire engine and take him to the hospital?” He speaks clearly, without any trace of the black dialect or the ghetto localisms.
I ignore him, because I know that he doesn’t understand the workings of an emergency service. We don’t take people to the
hospital because it ties us up. We deal in seconds and minutes. Seconds and minutes determine life and death in our business.
But this man doesn’t know that. He only knows that a man is bleeding on the street, and there are no ambulances to take him
to the hospital. He yells again. “You motherfuckers don’t care about black people. If that man was white you’d have him in
a hospital soon enough.” Many in the crowd nod in agreement, and others stare with interest. I look at the man on the ground,
and then look at the intruder. I would like to tell him about the kind of work firemen do. I would like to tell him about
people in this very neighborhood who are enjoying life only because of the actions of firemen. But it won’t make any sense.
This man doesn’t want to like me. Not here. Not now. Another time, perhaps, I can tell this man that I care as much as he
about the bleeding man at my feet. Even more important, J can ask him why he thinks I don’t care.

Four ambulances turn the corner at Intervale Avenue—the disaster unit from Bronx-Lebanon Hospital. The Chief radios the word
into the building, and firemen begin to carry the victims out. They are in chairs, or on stretchers. An attendant brings a
wheel chair to me, and we lift the bleeding man into it. The attendant rolls the chair to the ambulance, and the driver assists
us as we lift the chair into the antiseptic confines of the truck.

No one ate hamburgers in the firehouse today. They were ruined, but even if they were not burnt and dried out I don’t think
anyone would have felt like eating. It is after six now, and I’m sitting on a bed by my locker, putting on a clean pair of
socks. The Chief called the hospital, and they told him that three of the victims were dead on arrival. The large woman was
dead. She was eight months with child. Two men were dead, but Benny puffed life into the baby.

And now Benny is lying in a bed in the men’s ward of Bronx Hospital. He collapsed finally, after bringing the small, breathing
girl to the ambulance. The men’s ward at Bronx is a dingy place, and I’ve seen many firemen recoup there after they brutalized
their bodies in the course of their work. There are sixteen beds in the square, dim-gray room, and lying next to Benny is
Joe Mazillo who was one of the men who fought his way down from the roof. And next to Joe is Lieutenant Connell who supervised
the roof operation. The department medical officer has told us they will remain in the hospital for at least three days, for
rest, blood tests, and X-rays. But Jim Stack will have to stay a little longer. He is across the hall in the intensive care
unit, suffering dangerously high blood pressure and nerve palpitations. He felt a shocking pain as he helped George Hiegman
connect the pumper to the hydrant. And Artie Merritt has been transferred to the Manhattan Eye and Ear Hospital where he will
spend the night. He cut the cornea of his eye as he hit a table corner while crawling through the smoke. Three human beings
are dead, and ten are hospitalized for a fire that should have been routine.

I wonder what all this means. Is it ontological proof—that what God gives, He also takes away? Or does it mean that if there
were no drug addicts in New York City people wouldn’t have to put chains on roof doors?

I
was twenty-one when I filled in the blanks on the fireman’s application form. I didn’t know what the job was all about then—I
only knew that it was a mark of success for a neighborhood boy to become a fireman or a cop. They were secure jobs, and much
respected by our elders who had lived through the depression. The nuns in the school I attended as a child never spoke to
us about becoming doctors, or lawyers, only about becoming President of the United States, or a fireman, or a cop. Any of
us could become President, it was our birthright for we were all second generation Irish or Italian, but we could become firemen
or cops only if we applied ourselves, and managed in one way or another to get through high school—a great achievement in
those days.

The day of the civil service exam was bright and summer-hot. I borrowed my brother’s old '51 Chevy, and drove to a high school
in Greenwich Village where schoolteachers were going to earn time-and-a-half by proctoring the firemen’s test. There were
no parking spaces, so I double-parked the car—after all I was about to become an official of the City of New York, and no
policeman would dare to ticket it.

A thousand young men, armed with real or equivalency diplomas, were gathered in classrooms to answer the hundred questions
and to compete for the job. A legion of hopefuls in plaid shirts and gabardine trousers, all hunched over ink-stained desks,
squirming in the seats built for men five sizes smaller, and trying to remember the who-whom rule of seventh-grade grammar.
It was a hot day, and I remember sweating anxiously.