New York City Noir

by Tim McLoughlin

  “Don’t you have some place besides the firehouse to stay?” the captain pressed. “I mean, look at you. This is no life.”

  Even in the best of times, Mike Boyle never looked robust. He was Irish pale—with skin like gauze that showed every blotch, from the flush of a single beer to the shadows of a little missed sleep. His fine hair—maybe blond, maybe brown, depending on the light—tended to take the shape of any pillow or fire helmet that laid claim to it. He’d taken to wearing his navy-blue uniform pants and T-shirts around the clock, even sleeping in them.

  “I’d rather stay here,” said Mike. Moving someplace—in with his brother Patrick’s family in Yonkers, or his sister Mary and her tight-ass lawyer of a husband over in Riverdale—that would mean this thing with Gina was real. If he stayed in the firehouse, time would stand still. A watch just waiting for a new battery. All he had to do was stick it out a little longer.

  Captain Russo started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He was a dinosaur in the department—one of the last around to recall the Bronx of the 1970s and early ’80s, when whole blocks blazed like Roman candles, and firefighters sucked down equal parts black smoke and Budweiser on every tour. Whether it was smoking or leaving your wife, he wasn’t inclined to argue the particulars of how any man lived his life.

  And besides, on shifts at least, Mike was still pulling his weight. He pumped himself full of nicotine and caffeine and kept busy—making beds, fixing meals, washing the rig. When the alarm sounded, the adrenaline kicked in. Break a window, cut a hole in a roof, climb a ladder, take a door. As anyone who’s seen combat will tell you, you can pretty much keep going when the shit hits the fan. It was the empty, off-duty hours that were killing him. Even the simplest tasks seemed monumental. He started to toast a bagel one day, then watched with no particular interest as black ribbons of smoke emanated from the toaster. It was Tig—firefighter Jimmy Francesco—who unplugged the toaster and fished the cremated bagel out. All the while Mike just watched, not even sure if he’d really been hungry in the first place. When a firefighter in the engine company mentioned that he was going in the hospital for stomach surgery, Mike found himself daydreaming about the man’s anesthesia. Right now, he’d gladly trade a gut full of staples for a few hours of blankness.

  When the insomnia first hit, Mike fought it by driving his car up to his former house—a semi-attached stucco in Woodlawn across from the cemetery. He parked across the street and imagined Gina inside sleeping, wrapped up in one of his old FDNY T-shirts. Except she wasn’t—not one night anyway. She never came home. Then his car got stolen—he’d parked it too far from the firehouse doors. (The guys on duty got first dibs on the “safe” spots.) That ended his evening excursions.

  “If my wife kicked me out, I’d go home and beat the crap out of her.” Marital advice from Chuck of all people, the senior man in Ladder 123. Twenty-two years in the same firehouse and he still insisted on driving the rig all the way over to Arthur Avenue to buy groceries from the Italians. “I don’t buy from these,” he’d say, bringing the flat of his hand in front of his face: firehouse code for blacks. Chuck’s real name wasn’t Charles. It was Harry. Harry McGreevy. Chuck was short for “chuckles,” firehouse black humor. No one ever accused Harry McGreevy of being lighthearted. To Chuck, women were whores or lesbians, kids were parasites (he should know, he had five, all grown with two still living at home in Throgs Neck), and the city was personally out to screw him. His hobby was writing up parking tickets (a power no other firefighter in Mike’s memory had ever invoked). And he spent much of every tour talking about his theory that intelligence was inversely related to how close your ancestors lived to the equator. Mike wondered whether that meant people in the Bronx had a leg up over the other boroughs, but he wasn’t taking bets on it.

  “My church runs a prayer group for couples.” More advice. This time from Frankie Bones—a.k.a., Frank Bonaventura—the biggest guy in the firehouse. Six-foot-four, three hundred and fifty pounds, he looked like a Mafia enforcer out of central casting and used to have a reputation to match. But about ten years ago, Bones and his wife found Jesus and it had transformed him entirely. Of course, the joke around the firehouse was that if Frankie Bones went looking for you, you’d better damn well be found.

  “I’m not religious,” Mike reminded him.

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  “None more mysterious than you,” Chuck told Bones. Being senior, Chuck could say anything he wanted, even to Bones.

  “Hey, man,” Jimmy Francesco piped up, “you can stay at my place.”

  It figured that Tig, of all the firefighters, would make the offer. Francesco was everyone’s favorite firefighter, nicknamed after the Disney character Tigger because he was always bouncing around, ready for action. Too much action, as Mike saw it now. If his hands weren’t slapping his thighs, then he was doing a drumroll on the table. Or stroking the ever-needy Rufus. Tig had been a cop briefly before joining the FDNY, but no one could picture him arresting people. If he ever managed to collar some gangbanger, he’d have probably let him off with some cheery Disney advice like, Don’t do that again, buddy boy, okaly-dokely?

  “We’ve got the spare bedroom,” said Tig. “At least until the baby comes.”

  Mike watched Tig doing a drumroll on the table and wondered what twenty-four hours of that would feel like. Wondered how his wife stood it. A baby thumping at her insides, a husband doing the same from without.

  “Naw. Thanks anyway. I’m good.”

  Well, maybe not good. But insomnia did have its up side, even if it seemed to take longer and longer for Mike to tie his shoes or fit together two lengths of hose. The less sleep he got, the more he noticed he could manage without it. Had he really been spending a third of his life in willing oblivion? Death before death, as he saw it now. He watched firefighters napping in their bunks, people dozing on the subways, and he studied them with almost scientific detachment. They were dying every day and they didn’t even know it, slipping into their own private heaven and hell. Maybe that’s all heaven and hell was anyway, a longer bit of sleep.

  “I’m flling for separation,” Gina told him over the pay phone at the firehouse one day. “I think we should call your folks.”

  The morning crew was testing the saws and two other guys were arguing the Yankees batting lineup, so it took him a minute to process the news.

  “Was it the uniform?” he asked finally.

  “What?”

  “The uniform. My coat. My helmet. The big red truck that went ding ding through your neighborhood?”

  “You’re not making any sense, Mike.”

  “You get turned on by a little Nomex cloth and plastic?”

  She said something after that, but Mike couldn’t hear. The guys on duty had a run. Curses. Shouts. Feet slapping the rubber mat as they slid down the pole. The diesel throttling. The gears in the apparatus door cranking away as they rolled up to reveal the hot, steamy August morning heat and the vague smell of urine on the pavement.

  “You even know who I am?” He wasn’t sure if he’d said those words or just thought them before hanging up. It was hard to tell over the noise.

  For a blessed moment after the truck pulled away, it seemed to suck all the noise with it. He didn’t feel the rumble of the Jerome Avenue elevated overhead or the honk and grind of buses and gypsy cabs on the blistering street. Then the great doors closed again and he felt for one panicked moment like he was drowning.

  He needed a cup of coffee. (Gotta get that espresso with the lemon peel.) And a couple of smokes too. And then what? The rush would last twenty minutes tops, then he’d forget how to connect a hose, or which way the walkie-talkie batteries went in. He’d write the wrong month in the housewatch book. He’d dial the wrong combination to his locker.

  What he needed was to get out. But without wheels, his options were limited. This was Tremont, after all. What wasn’t paved over in housing projects and six-story crackerbox apar
tments was covered with storefront strips of check cashing joints, bodegas, liquor stores, and Pentecostal churches. The heat made the days untenable. And at night, what pale-faced Irishman was likely to feel at home here?

  It was Rufus who finally drove him out. Rufus, that rangy, bowlegged mutt who suffered the animal equivalent of a panic attack every time the firefighters left on a run. Mike couldn’t sleep when the firefighters were in quarters and Rufus couldn’t sleep when they were out. A walk would do them both good.

  So he tied a length of rope around Rufus’s collar late that night and off they went, the dog—part retriever, part Sherman tank—gleeful at their escape. Rufus plowed along the boulevard with the determined gusto of an evangelist. He liked everyone—toddlers in soggy underwear dancing under the sprays of uncapped fire hydrants; fat old women in housedresses drinking beer on tenement stoops; drunks slugging it out for the right to bed down under an overpass. None of it tired him out. Or Mike, for that matter. But it did give him an odd feeling of liberation to be crisscrossing housing projects at 2 a.m., sidestepping the hulking young men with looks as sharp as razor wire.

  He called Gina when he got back. Woke her up. At least she was there. He felt giddy and a little breathless from his walk.

  “You had no idea who I was, did you?”

  “Who else would call me at this hour?”

  “I mean when I first asked you out.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “You’d met me twice. Through your cousin Maria. And you still didn’t know who I was when I asked you out.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Four and a half years is not a long time ago.” He found himself gulping for air. He hadn’t walked that hard. Maybe it was panic. He had the same sensation when he crawled down a smoke-charged hallway. He was heading into something he couldn’t see that would only do him harm. “You know when you remembered me? When I told you I was Mike the firefighter.”

  “So?”

  “Like I said, it was about the coat. It was always about the coat.”

  “Mike?” Her voice was hoarse and tentative. “I’ve met someone.”

  He hung up. He’d bailed out of enough windows to know something about outrunning flames. No point in standing there, letting yourself get burned. Maybe she would call back and tell him it was all a mistake. Maybe she would be tearful and apologetic. For the first time in nearly seven weeks he longed for noise, and that damn phone never made a sound. He was shadow-boxing with himself.

  * * *

  “Hey, Mikey,” Chuck growled the next morning, “you want to be target practice for the natives, go ahead. But Rufus doesn’t need any shell-casings as souvenirs.”

  “I thought a walk would help me sleep.”

  “They put a bullet through you, brother, you’ll sleep. Trust me.”

  Tig got him alone in the locker room the next day—they were on the same shift—and handed him a gym bag. “If you’re gonna walk around this neighborhood all hours, least you should do is take this.” Inside was Tig’s old NYPD windbreaker and an authentic-looking replica of his badge. All the guys had replicas made so they could keep the real ones at home. That way, if you lost it, you wouldn’t face departmental charges.

  “Thanks,” said Mike, stuffing the bag in his locker. He felt guilty he wasn’t more appreciative of Tig’s generosity, then angry that Tig never seemed to notice. The man was awash in admiration, the sun in all its glory. What difference was the light of one more star?

  “I figured most people will think twice before messing with a cop,” said Tig. “Just don’t let it get out that I did this, okay? I shouldn’t have a copy of my badge when I don’t have the real one anymore. The PD might get sore at me.”

  “I’m good,” said Mike. Whatever that meant. It was all he could manage of conversation these days. Lately, he’d begun to confuse words, calling Bones’s decision to become a Jesus groupie his “salivation,” and Chuck’s worldviews, somewhere to the right of the Michigan Militia, his “egotistical theory.” Not that those interpretations were entirely incorrect. Still, it irked him the way his thoughts seemed to fly around like mosquitoes these days, tormenting and annoying him, without the sweet reprieve of sleep.

  Mike continued his walks alone at night. Of course, in Tremont alone was a relative term. Even at 3 a.m., salsa and rap blared from open windows along with the smell of fried porkchops, rice and beans. Beer bottles shattered on concrete. Dirty diapers dropped off the edges of fire escapes. Car alarms whooped. Trains rumbled overhead. Babies wailed. Fights spilled out of doorways like liquid mercury, carried along on whatever current picked them up.

  No one bothered Mike. The NYPD jacket and badge probably helped. But he suspected he inhabited the jacket the same way he inhabited his turnout coat. He wasn’t a cop any more than he was a firefighter. Not in his marrow—not like some of the guys. Not like Tig. He knew this when he saw Tig lower himself unflinchingly into a fire-charged room or push forward when his alarm told him he had just minutes of air left in his tank. Never a minute of self-doubt or hesitation. Three fucking years in the FDNY and the guy was more of a firefighter than Mike, with his ten, would ever be. And the goddamn prick slept well too.

  Was there a connection here? Mike wondered. Lose the fear of death and you lose the fear of sleep? For what was death, really, but a longer, richer cousin?

  He needed a place to test his hypothesis. He didn’t have to look far: Jerome Avenue, a test of nerves if ever there was one. One wide lane of traffic in each direction. Double-parked cars that made pedestrians nearly impossible to notice. Badly timed lights. Third World gypsy cab drivers who thought stopping on red was merely a suggestion. Four people had died in the past six months crossing near his firehouse. The guys had taken to tying Rufus up on nice nights so he wouldn’t decide to follow the rigs and end up as roadkill.

  * * *

  Two nights later, at dusk, when traffic was at its peak, Mike crossed against the light. His heart thumped, his bowels turned to jelly, but it did not help him sleep. The next night he was off, he hopped onto the Jerome Avenue elevated tracks, just to see how long he could stand there before he lost his nerve. Again, his limbs quivered when he heard the approaching train and felt the vibrations along the tracks. Again, he shivered and sweated, felt his bowels go weak and a giddiness overtake him as he scrambled up the filthy concrete wall that separated the tracks from the platform. But sleep did not overtake him. Both the engine and truck went out all night for small fires, false alarms, and medical emergencies. Short of being in a coma, there was no way to sleep through an air horn.

  Still, Mike felt convinced there was something to his hypothesis. If only he could find the right test of nerves. The third night he was off, he set a fire in a trash can at the back of a five-story tenement under demolition. The lot was rimmed in razor wire, but a set of bolt cutters, borrowed from the firehouse, cut through the chain-link cleanly.

  The tenement, still imposing from the street, was a shell at the back. No windows or doors. Just a warren of crumbling plaster rooms held up, it seemed, by iron scaffolding and plank walkways. A brace on a withering limb.

  The plan had been to set the fire, see how long he could take the heat, then extinguish the flames. But it didn’t work out that way. The flames burned hotter and higher than Mike had intended. They latched onto one of the overhead planks on the scaffolding, then curled around it like an old woman’s fingers. Gray-black smoke snuffed out the reflected glow of streetlamps, leaving Mike confused and disoriented as he stumbled backwards over mattress springs and old tires. When he regained his bearings, he became aware of a new light. It was pale and flickering at first, but it was growing inside one of the second-story windows.

  He had become so used to the sirens, it took him a full minute to understand that the rigs he was used to seeing from the back were now barreling toward him, lights ricocheting like gunfire off the surrounding low-level buildings. Smoke was churning out of the second-st
ory window now. There was nothing Mike could do but run. He tossed the bolt cutters in some weeds and scrambled over to the hole in the fence. His foot caught the remains of a shopping cart and he stumbled, bruising an elbow and knee in the fall. He didn’t even feel the pain as he climbed through the fence, then ran down a narrow gap between a bodega and a liquor store. He felt certain that at any moment he’d feel the thud of a fist on his back—Chuck’s probably. Somebody from the firehouse had to have seen him. What could he say? What had he done?

  It took less than five minutes to reach the firehouse, but it seemed like an eternity. Both rigs were out. A firefighter on housewatch had recorded a 10–75, FDNY code for a working fire. Mike could hear the dispatch reports across the department radio. Box 4311—he’d remember that number for the rest of his life. It was a second alarm now. Fifteen companies. A hundred and twenty men and a deputy chief to boot. Jeez, he was up to his eyeballs in this one.

  He couldn’t just be here waiting when the guys returned. Should he call a lawyer? The union rep? He walked into the locker room and stared into his hands. Did they smell of smoke? He couldn’t be sure given the pervasive odor of mildew and chlorine disinfectant. Were there telltale burns? He looked at himself in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot. He needed a shave. His left elbow and knee had begun to swell slightly but the discomfort was nothing compared to the dizziness and nausea that had overtaken his body. He stumbled to the bunk room and collapsed on his bunk. No rigs. No firefighters. Even Rufus, for once, stayed away.