Bronx Noir

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-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?