Bronx Noir Page 9
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-story 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.
It was five hours before he awoke—the longest sleep he’d had since he left Gina. He couldn’t recall where he was. A shaft of morning sunlight shot across the bunk room, illuminating dust motes in the air. Tig was drinking a cup of coffee and checking his work calendar in his locker.
“Hey, Mikey, ten minutes more and I was gonna check you for a pulse. We’re on duty at oh-nine-hundred, you know.”
Mike tried to speak, but his throat felt as scratchy as the city-issued wool blanket across his bed. His elbow and knee were tender to the touch.
“I hear we both missed a good fire last night. At that vacant on Tremont Avenue. It went to three alarms.”
“Shit.” Mike closed his eyes. He’d been hoping he’d dreamed that. “Anyone hurt?”
“I think a couple of the usuals tapped out. Back injuries. But you know a lot of that stuff is bullshit.”
“Ummm.” Mike studied Tig tapping a pencil on his work calendar. Tig wasn’t the subtle type. If he suspected anything, he could never have hidden it this well. Then again, he wasn’t on duty last night. They were both working the exact same schedule.
“Are the fire marshals investigating it?”
“Probably. We just put the suckers out. The rest is somebody else’s problem, right?” Tig frowned at him. Mike’s hands were shaking. “You gotta get out of this firehouse, my friend.”
“I get out.”
“I mean for real. They ever find your car?”
Mike shook his head no.
“I got a friend at the police impound lot. Sometimes stolen cars end up there and it takes awhile before anyone gets around to letting the owner know. I’ll give him a call, see if he can find out anything.”
Downstairs, Mike’s presence was regarded with the usual mix of blank stares and indifference. No fire marshals came to the firehouse. No one asked where Mike had been last night or what he’d been doing. No one seemed to miss the bolt cutters. Only Mike felt strange. Clenched and claustrophobic—like he was breathing through a straw. But as the day wore on, as he went into his next tour and the next night with no sleep, only the dull ache of his elbow and knee for company, he began to look back longingly on those few hours when he made the trucks and firefighters and noise go away. He—Mike Boyle, a ghost in his own firehouse—he controlled the shots. Not Tig or Chuck or Captain Russo or some staff chief downtown. They only reacted.
Oh that sweet, sweet sleep. Why couldn’t he get it back? There were other runs that kept the men out, but some of them were during the day when it was too hot to sleep, even with the ancient air conditioners running full blast. Others came during maintenance checks or bouts of Rufus’s barking or times when the guys left food on the stove and told Mike to keep an eye on it. What he needed was a working fire he could count on. A good three-alarmer after midnight. No casualties. Just fire and plenty of it.
So he set one. At E-Z Discount Furniture on Fordham Road. Ten years of fighting fires had given Mike Boyle a pretty good idea how to start them. Ventilation systems were good. Just pry off a cover, stick a road flare and a little kerosene down a shaft, and let it simmer for ten minutes. E-Z was just that. It yielded six hours of uninterrupted sleep. Belmont Air-Conditioning and Appliances was good for another four. They’d ripped Tig off on a busted air conditioner he’d bought a few weeks ago, so Mike felt especially good about gutting their store. A track fire in the subway netted another three and a half.
“Hey Mikey, my friend found your car.” Tig waved a piece of paper in his face. Typical Tig, he couldn’t just write down the information, he had to doodle all over the page and get his smudge prints on everything. “It’s down at the impound lot like I figured. It got stripped for parts, but it wasn’t totaled, at least. Your insurance will probably pay for the damage. Just tell them your friend Jimmy Francesco sent you and there won’t be any hassles.” Tig handed Mike the slip of paper with a phone number and his friend’s name down at the impound lot. “Now that you’ll have your wheels back, you’ll be able to find a place to settle down.”
“I don’t want the car.”
“You’re buying a new car?”
“I’m not buying any car. Gina holds the insurance. Let her get it towed to Woodlawn. I don’t need it.”
“You can’t live here forever.”
“So now you’re going to tell me where I can live?”
Tig’s face tightened, like he’d just taken a punch. “Take it easy, Mikey. Everybody’s just worried about you.”
“Maybe you’re the one they should be worried about.”
Captain Russo tried talking to Mike later. So did Chuck. And Frankie Bones. But no one wanted to be the one to force a brother out of the firehouse.
Except Rufus. He was the one thing—the one hairy, smelly thing—that still stood between Mike Boyle and a perfect night’s sleep. Mike tried tying Rufus up, but that made him whine. He tried locking him in the basement weight room, but that made him bark. The stupid dog ruined a perfectly good 10–75 Mike had set at a laundromat. The fire would’ve given him a good five or six hours if Rufus hadn’t loused it up.
So one hot night in late August when the guys were on a run, Mike took Rufus on one last walk. Along Jerome Avenue. Without a leash.
“How did this happen?” Chuck’s voice actually cracked when he asked the question. Mike had to admit he was a little surprised to see the inventor of the equatorial theory, a man who considered Hitler one of the world’s greatest leaders, broken up about a stray mutt.
The guys avoided Mike after that. Even Tig kept his distance. Mike didn’t care. He wasn’t leaving, and that was all there was to it. He wasn’t scared of anything anymore. Not Gina leaving him. Not fighting fires. Not charges from Captain Russo or pressure from Bones. He wasn’t even scared the day two fire marshals came around the firehouse asking to speak to him.
“You know why we’re here, don’t you?”
“I believe I do,” said Mike evenly. They had called him up to Captain Russo’s office, a boxy little room with one grimy window overlooking the street. They had asked the captain to leave.
“We found an NYPD jacket and badge and a scrap of paper with the number of a police impound lot. It was all there, stuffed into a trash can near the ruins of Belmont Air-Conditioning and Appliances.”
“Really?”
“You know who it might belong to?”
“Should I?”
The two marshals looked at each other. “We’d like to talk to you—privately—at headquarters, if you don’t mind.”
Mike walked over to the window. A black sedan was parked below with the motor running. “Is it air-conditioned?”
“Headquarters?”
“Your car?”
“Of course. The trip to Metrotech in Brooklyn is likely to take at least an hour and a half in this traffic.”
“And dark?”
“The car? We have tinted windows, if that’s what you mean.”
“And quiet?”
“See for yourself,” suggested one of the marshals.
Mike Boyle followed the men downstairs to the backseat of the car and stepped inside. The vinyl was deliciously cold. A gentle purring of frosty air hummed out of the vents. The department radio had been thoughtfully turned down. One of the marshals stepped in beside him and closed the door. A tiny puff of air escaped, giving Mike the impression that the whole compartment was hermetically sealed. The outside noise—the subway, the car alarms, the sirens—all ceased.
“Do you know any reason why James Francesco would want to set all those fires?” asked the marshal who’d stepped in beside him.
“Tig? Oh, I have my theories,” said Mike, settling into the seat. He tilted his head back so his neck rested on the icy vinyl. His sweat condensed instantly and a chill rolled down his spine. “People who sleep well don’t fear death, you know. They’re always the ones to watch.” Then he closed his eyes and gave into the sensation of falling from a great height and landing onto something so soft, he could stay like this forever.
THE CHEERS LIKE WAVES
BY KEVIN BAKER
Yankee Stadium
When he got off the train he could already hear the stadium, the noise of the big crowd breaking like the waves out on Jones Beach, from when he was a kid. First there was the low preliminary hiss of anticipation, then letting out with a long, full-throated rush. The wave breaking over him, knocking him off his feet in the water. He put the cheap suitcase down on the platform and stood there with his eyes closed, remembering. Remembering how they had waited for that second rush, down in the basement of Mercedes’s husband—waiting to kill a man.
He opened his eyes and wiped a sleeve across his forehead, the seams of the ancient suit he wore nearly tearing out at the shoulder. The jacket was too small for him now, stretched nearly to the breaking point where his torso bulged from so many years of prison iron and prison food. He worried about the suit. The last thing he wanted was to look ridiculous in front of her, but he couldn’t wait. He had come up as soon as he got off the prison bus, after the endless jolting ride from upstate; making only a quick stop to pick up something he needed, in the back of a bodega that his last cellmate had told him about. Taking the 4 train from there, until it poured up out of the tunnel to the 161st Street stop, past the vast blue-and-white monolith that was the stadium.
Now he was finally here, after so many years of thinking about it, and everything was…off-balance, as if he were a little dizzy. All the same, but different. From the train platform, he could look into the open half-shell of the stadium’s upper deck and see the big crowd there, the people laughing and enjoying themselves, drinking their beers. That was us. That whole loco summer, when everything had seemed unreal then too. Thirty years ago. The two of them sitting night after night up in the last rows of the upper deck, sipping slowly at the stale stadium beer, trying to make it last—trying to make the whole night last. Hoping for one more rally by the Yankees, anybody, so he could stay a little while longer with Mercedes, touching her smooth brown knee beside him, kissing her mouth.
He had heard the games all his life, growing up in one of the pale-brick apartment buildings along Gerard Avenue. He could follow them by the ebb and swell of the crowd noise alone; the collective, disappointed sighs; the cheers, the boos—the vast, hissing intake of breath when something good was in the offing. The wave roaring in after that, a feral, vicious noise, fifty thousand voices sensing the kill. Everyone in the building would lean out their windows on a sweltering summer’s night and listen to it. The old folks smoking and chatting quietly with each other in Spanish; the younger people bored and silent, staring down into the concrete courtyard.
That was where Luis had first seen her, walking her path through the courtyard to the basement. Making her way like a nun across all the trash that he didn’t bother to clean up even for his woman. Head down, arms crossed over her chest, moving quickly through the smashed brown beer bottles, and the cans, and all the other junk in her open shoes. That was where he had seen her, and decided he had to talk to her, even though she kept her head down all the time, never looking up at the men who laughed and called to her from their windows.
Now he was finally back, and about to see her again. He headed on down through the cage of iron bars that encased the 161st Street station. Latecomers scurried down the steps in front of him, kids skipping and prancing about in shirts bearing the names of players he had never heard of. He kept his distance from them, still walking in the careful prison shuffle that was second nature to him now, carrying the cheap suitcase easily in one hand. All it held were his remaining clothes from the old days, a few mottled snapshots, the Bible he had been given on his confirmation, and a deportment medal from grammar school. Everything that his mama had left for him near the end, when she knew that she was dying. They were all that remained of his previous life, the only possessions he had in the world—save for the item he had just acquired in the back of that bodega down on East 124th Street, wrapped carefully in a paper bag and secured in his inside jacket pocket. Any con would see it coming a mile away, he knew, but he didn’t expect that to matter.
He made his way down to the street, and it all came back to him in a rush. He missed his step and staggered off the curb, stunned momentarily by the sheer, overwhelming familiarity of it all. His eyes blinking rapidly, trying to accustom themselves to the dappled, pigeon-streaked world beneath the elevated that he had run through so many times as a boy. There was the same newsstand on the corner; the same seedy row of souvenir booths; a bowling alley. The smell of pretzels and hot dogs cooking over charcoal in the vendors’ carts. All the same, somehow. Back when he was still her Luis, her amado, and his hair was still thick and black, his stomach flat and hard as an ironing board from packing meat on the trucks all day.
She had loved him then. He knew it. Why else would she have been there, up on his floor that day? Why would she be there now?
Despite his vow to meet her, to talk to her, he hadn’t had any idea how to do it. She belonged to Roberto, the super, walking every evenin
g like a novitiate to his fiery kingdom in the basement.
Roberto was not a man to go up against—everybody in the building said that. He was short but built like a bull, with a mat of hair on his chest. Stripped to the waist, summer and winter, always strutting about, flinging open the furnace door and digging vigorously at the grate ash with a fire iron. People in the neighborhood whispered that it was there he burned the bodies of all the men he had killed. He kept a .38 jammed into the front of his jeans, where everyone could see the handle. He wore a pair of wraparound aviator glasses, so that with his pointed beard and his perpetual leer, Luis thought he looked like some kind of demonic insect down in the fiery half-light of the basement.
When Luis came down to pay the rent for Mama, Roberto would bully him. Forcing Luis to wait while he told him his stories about all the things he had done, the women he had taken, the men he had killed. He bullied everyone who came down to plead in vain for him to fix something, or to give them a couple extra days on the rent. Sure that he could keep them all in line.
“I don’ even need the gun. I give them a taste of this, and that’s all!” he would laugh, waving the iron poker just underneath Luis’s chin, and Luis would have to stand there, not daring to leave; trying desperately not to flinch, though the iron was so close he could smell the heat coming off it. Keeping that beautiful, beautiful girl, with those beautiful, large brown eyes, all to himself. But Luis had seen a dozen other beautiful girls who belonged to men cruising down the Grand Concourse in big cars. Laughing loudly, showing off the gold around their necks and on their fingers, always ready to reach for the piece under their shirts and show that off too. Men like Luis looked at her beautiful eyes and looked away, going about their business.