Jerome Charyn - Bronx Noir

“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 apartments 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.