Jerome Charyn - Bronx Noir

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.

It was the dog or him.

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.

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.