The Nine Jakes
--In memory of John F. Heaney
Dennis Donoghue
Russell missed his back scratcher. The hospital had given him a drug for the itch caused by other drugs but nothing worked like his back scratcher. The diagnosis was late stage melanoma, as explained to him six months ago not by the surgeon who confused him but by Mama Bear, the niece who took care of him. Another niece, Baby Bear, also took care of him but Mama Bear, being a nurse herself, was the more involved of the two. As he’d always been a fighter his surgeon was happy to oblige, taking bits and pieces before moving on to his right ear and a chunk off the top of his skull the size of a quarter. Twenty years ago he’d lost his right eye when he’d driven off the road so when conversing he had to turn his head to see and hear who was speaking to him. With the one ear his eyeglasses wouldn’t stay straight on his face. Now he was being transferred from his local hospital in Dorchester to Mass Eye and Ear in Boston where they’d done the surgery. An infection had set in and he didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know what that meant. His run-of-the-mill anxiety had given way to a kind as aggressive as the cancer that had him begging for a pain pill ten minutes after he’d received one. And, to top it off, he couldn’t go to the bathroom. He didn’t want an enema but something had to be done. He moved up and down the length of the hospital corridor with his walker, hoping that might help. More than anything he wanted to return to his two room apartment on the third floor of the Atria with a view of the Neponset River he swam in as a kid. He wanted to watch college football in his recliner and shoot the breeze with his friends in the dining room, many of whom he’d grown up with.
While recovering from the amputation Russell pleaded with Mama Bear and Baby Bear and anyone else who’d listen to go to the firehouse up the street and have a piece of apparatus dispatched to take him home. Staring at hospital walls weeks running did that to you. A month before the surgery he’d lost his beloved sister and was still reeling. The six of them had stayed close, a miracle in itself, given their childhood.
“They’ll be here in an hour,” said Eileen, one of the floor nurses.
If possible he liked to be dressed whenever transported by ambulance. From his U. S. Marine travel bag he pulled out a pair of khakis, plaid boxer shorts, a white tee shirt, white cotton socks, a gray hooded sweatshirt with a zipper. Though once a Marine always a Marine he’d hated his time with them, the vindictive orders and the way he’d been spoken to for no reason other than spite. He’d swung only after he’d been swung at which was why he’d never risen above the rank of corporal. Though far from perfect and suspicious of people unlike himself, he’d met all kinds during his hospital stays who were unfailingly good to him, leaving him to conclude he’d been duped to think a certain way.
No matter how Russell spun it he was close to the end, eighty-two years old the day after Christmas. He pushed aside the overbed table with the covered dish of meatloaf and green beans. After pulling on his khakis, he tugged four notches down his belt, one for every ten pounds. He tucked in the tee shirt, zippered the sweatshirt, combed what hair he had left on his head. In the lobby of the Atria hung a framed photo of him along with other residents-- men and women alike--under the heading Heroes. A folded American flag in a triangular glass case was mounted beneath as if it had come off a coffin. He didn’t consider himself courageous, just someone who’d done what any decent person would have done in the situation in which he’d found himself. Training for the Boston Fire Department he’d hauled a two hundred pound dummy down an aerial ladder. He’d once weighed two-fifty. Better never to have been strong, to have relied on your body for your livelihood, expecting it to be there. He wouldn’t have missed it had he sat behind a desk all day. Still, he had more to lose. A week ago he’d had some kind of stroke. His face drooped and went numb. They’d told him Bell’s Palsy. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going away. The cancer piled on--infections, inflammations, tumors, you name it. The drugs numbed the symptoms, the news all bad, which was why his anxiety was off the charts. They’d kept him going and now the bag of tricks was empty.
He put his teeth in and slipped on his white sneakers with Velcro straps. You could lose a ton of weight and still have the same shoe size. His watch spun on his wrist. Once he’d eaten anything put in front of him, even hospital food. Still, he was better off than some. Had it not been for Mama Bear and Baby Bear God knows where he’d be. But he could be stubborn and unappreciative. Pain did that to you. He would apologize to Mama Bear and later Baby Bear when she spelled Mama Bear. At times when he called Mama Bear she wouldn’t answer the phone. She worked nights in the ER in the same hospital he was about to leave and stowed his pills in a tackle box under the sink in his apartment, never worrying he’d get into it because if he tried he’d end up on the floor. There would be no more surgeries but there were still drugs though hospitals were stingy, as if he was some kind of addict. Whenever they were late with his dose or denied him outright when he told them it wasn’t enough, Mama Bear would chase down the floor nurse or attending physician. Mama Bear, besides being a nurse, had grown up in the same neighborhood and wasn’t one to cross. A week ago she’d cornered a young resident until a nurse stepped between them.
Except for the pain, he wasn’t desperate. He’d had a full life. The children of the nine jakes had grandchildren of their own now. He’d been standing on the sidewalk beside the Hotel Vendome holding a coiled firehose while others were on the fifth floor engaged in ax and rake duty. It was mopup time, the fire in the unoccupied hotel under control. Engine 7, the piece of apparatus on which he’d spent his career as driver and pump operator, idled on Dartmouth Street. When the five floors of the southeast corner collapsed, sixteen jakes went with them. There was a roar and then nothing for what seemed like ages. Russell hesitated a moment, as if waiting to be told what he’d just seen. Not ten feet away, the collar of a jake’s rubber coat stuck out from the rubble. Reflexively, he scaled the pile and held on to it for dear life, excavating debris with his free hand--pieces of brick, twisted rebar, hunks of mortar. He didn’t release his hold even when Cambridge Rescue arrived with cables thick enough to lift one floor off another. He clung to the collar until the tension of the cable sent him ass over tea kettle. Cut up and dizzy, he didn’t recognize his own blood until someone mentioned it. He’d taken the buried jake with him, pulled him loose with a mad tug that wrenched his shoulder from its socket. He came out of the hole covered head to toe in soot as if he’d been shot out of a chimney.
With the weight loss his dentures were too big for his mouth. One eye, one ear, horse teeth and almost no hair on his head. The ladies would take a pass, thank you. He’d been going steady with Marie until twenty-three children were left fatherless. The morning of the funeral for the nine at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross was when he was discharged from Boston City. He put on his uniform and went directly to the Mass and stood in a pew with the other jakes. He said his prayers and listened to the eulogies. He hadn’t given Marie a ring because he didn’t have the money. But it was a foregone conclusion. They’d spoken of the future. Everyone said how great they were together, what beautiful children they would have with her olive skin and his green eyes. Other than the shoulder, he was fine. And he told everyone he was fine. His mother who came to live with him after her legs gave out begged him to quit when she took one look at him in the hospital bed.
--What kind of job kills nine of you in the blink of an eye? And those poor children without fathers over a wreck of a building that should have been let burn to the ground.
During the Mass celebrated by Archbishop Humberto Medeiros he vowed he’d never do that, leave his children fatherless. When he informed Marie she waited a month for him to change his mind before she sent him packing. In any line of work there was risk, she cried. You could get killed crossing the street. What about cops and coal miners and power linemen? They had armies of kids, didn’t they? She didn’t make a dent.
Well he couldn’t do anything about it now. He was down to months, weeks at the rate he was going. A year ago they’d stenciled his nickname The Bull on the cab of Engine 7, the young jakes gathered around him at the firehouse as if he was Babe Ruth or Vince Lombardi. There was a plaque with his name embedded in a rock out back alongside a granite bench. They broke the mold, someone said. Never see another one like him. Nothing made him happier than giving his time and money to fellow veterans and jakes. He could sling it with the best of them so he was easy to be around, witty and genial, the perfect combination, a few words all it took to pull you in. He’d wondered what the young jakes thought of him with his glass eye and one ear, well on his way to skin and bones. It wasn’t like the old days when his was the busiest firehouse in the city. There was better detection now and strict building code inspections. It was safer but hardly firefighting. You rode inside a heated cab and breathed air from a tank on your back. But you still had the drug crazies, the ones who wanted to kill you for showing up to save them, the drunk kids sawed out of overturned cars at three in the morning, the three deckers without smoke detectors going up in minutes.
He had to take something for his anxiety. Nights destroyed him, the dreams terrifying. Mindeating hallucinations, a full ten minutes to get his bearings. Every hour he woke up and clutched the bed rail. Just dreams but good Jesus they were bad. Side effects he was told. Days he could manage with the natural light and people to talk to. He read The Herald and watched sports and the news. Nights finished him. And it was almost night now. In a short while he’d be on Storrow Drive on his way to Mass Eye and Ear. Passing by The Esplanade he’d tell the EMTs how he’d met George H.W. Bush after Marine One landed there for an event at the Park Plaza. He was on fire detail and shook his hand. Bush was born in Milton and loved the Red Sox. His favorite player was Ted Williams. When Bush asked him when the Sox would win a World Series again, he’d said, “The year after both of us are gone.” They’d laughed and the President embraced him. He felt like some big shot. The black and white photograph was tacked on the wall of his apartment. He’d been so stunned he hadn’t taken off his glove. They’d laughed about that at the firehouse. Who did he think he was shaking hands with, the bartender at J.J. Foley’s?
His brother who had five kids had been a firefighter not in Boston but a small town on the South Shore where there were no hotels to fall on you. After Marie there’d been women here and there but nothing serious. They’d never gotten far enough to discuss it. He could imagine their reaction. He never mentioned the fire unless someone brought it up, like the nephew who was doing a research paper for his American history class and wanted a primary source, reminding him he had a place in Boston history. He’d dismissed it, saying he would have done the same thing. But the nephew corrected him.
--You put your personal safety last for the sake of someone in need. That’s the definition of a hero.
The night he lost his eye he hadn’t remembered what happened. He’d been drinking but was okay, a couple under his limit. They’d found him in the woods. Maybe a deer or black ice. He’d awoken in a hospital bed. He wondered if death was like that. He’d wonder where he was, where the pain had gone, and be told he had died. He hoped it was like that anyway. The nine jakes didn’t feel much. They were dead by the time anyone got to them. He prayed for them every day, forty-six years and counting. The smooth rubber of the collar was still in his grasp. The jake was from a firehouse on the other side of the city but whenever they crossed paths he said, “You saved my life you SOB but you tore my favorite overcoat.” It was a joke between them. He loved that, the ribbing they gave one another. You couldn’t talk that way anymore. He wouldn’t last ten minutes in this day and age. People could take a joke back then.
They’d told him surgery would slow down the cancer. For that he’d given up his ear. Now it was killing him. Two or three times a day one of the Bears changed the dressing which flopped off the side of his head. He looked as if he’d taken a cannonball. And for what? At the time he’d thought maybe a year but he’d heard what he’d wanted to hear. There’d be no prosthetic ear. If the infection went away maybe, or if he was younger. Half the time he didn’t wear his eye anyway. The choppers were a nuisance. He didn’t want an ear. Something else that wouldn’t fit him properly.
He sat on the bed and waited. No cause had been found. The hotel had lost its structural integrity after years of code violations during renovations. It was primed to come down. But for the fact he was three feet closer to the street he would have gone the way of the nine jakes. For the last forty-six years he’d played with house money. His nephew got an A on the paper, the teacher writing, “Wow, an honest-to-goodness primary source--and hero to boot!”. Would he be willing to speak to the class? He said yes though he wouldn’t. He knew what would happen when he got up there in front of a bunch of high school kids. They’d expect him in a cape. He’d get to talking and it would come back--the silence, what it was like to hear nothing at all, every bit of sound devoured, an absolute stillness that included his own breath. He would describe a spooky vacuum, a void from some distant corner of the universe. He’d never experienced anything like it even after the jets he’d refueled in Korea cut their turbines. The kids would shuffle their feet and clear their throats. He was scaring the shit out of them. He’d glance at the teacher and end by telling them the building only did what it was supposed to do, as the investigation later found out. It was just a case of bad timing.
The ambulance had reached the hospital. He could walk on his own but per regulations they’d strap him to a gurney. He used the bathroom to pee and check himself in the mirror. Mama Bear would meet him downstairs. Having been a nurse for many years she understood hospitals. If the BFD was run like one the city would burn down overnight. The time he’d fallen in the lobby of the Atria no one could help him up, not the nurse on duty, the CNAs, not even the custodian who had him under the arms until he was instructed to lay him back down until the EMTs arrived. They’d lifted him and he’d walked unassisted to the dining room. God help you if you went beyond your job description. These days he’d be fired for reaching for that jake’s collar. It was someone else’s job to save his life. Just as well he wasn’t going to be around forever. His sister had passed away in a large airy room on a summer estate once owned by wealthy Bostonians. The hospice sat on a hill overlooking Hingham Bay where whitetail deer grazed in a wildflower meadow below her window. There were no beeping sounds, IVs or harsh lighting, no one prodding you every ten minutes and then ignoring you for hours. When he came to say goodbye he was struck by the tranquility of the place. The staff arrived only to change her bedding, place a few drops of morphine under her tongue, offer words of comfort. They were from some religious order, or so it seemed. During his visit a nurse told him God was present. She touched his arm and spoke as if God had just walked in from the parking lot. But he’d felt something. He couldn’t say what exactly. His sister was dying and yet she was fine. And he was fine too. The feeling stayed with him as his nephew drove him home. Even after it left he remembered it. That was enough, to know it had been there. He guessed the Bears had discussed the next step, practicing what to say and how to say it, picking a day to introduce the topic. Short of his surgeon pulling a miracle drug out of his fanny, that discussion was coming sooner rather than later. But not right now. He didn’t have to worry. Maybe there’d be a cure for cancer in the meantime, some targeted therapy he’d read about. Maybe he’d be saved. He could hope at least. As bad as he was, he wanted to stay around for a while.
He’d known the nine jakes though they weren’t from his firehouse. They all knew one another. Three had put in a furnace and boiler for him, muscling it through the small bulkhead to the other end of the cellar. They’d saved him a fortune. They all had side jobs to make ends meet. On and off through the years he’d seen the twenty-three kids at fundraisers and memorials. Some had sought him out, wanting to know what he could tell them. They’d turned out fine, most of them, even after the mothers remarried. Marie had seven kids of her own, three boys and four girls. She was a grandmother. He’d kept track. He’d seen her out and about but kept his distance. Given the circumstances he thought it best. He could imagine what the nine jakes would have said. Why didn’t we ask you before we knocked up our wives? What the hell were we thinking?
Eileen brought him release papers to sign. He put his Marine travel bag on the overbed table.
--My father was a Marine, she said. My grandfather too. Now my son wants to enlist. I wouldn’t mind so much if wars didn’t go on forever.
--If he goes to college he won’t have to dig a trench for no reason and have his mother’s reputation questioned in front of a whole platoon.
--Okay, I’ll let him know. Someone at the nurses’ station googled you. She does that to everyone. My aunt’s father died at that fire. She still remembers the phone call in the middle of the night. He’d just started his shift. She was only four and had a two year old brother.
He nodded when she mentioned the jake’s name. She placed a hand on his shoulder. She was a friendly nurse unafraid to touch her patients. She apologized for his pain. She couldn’t imagine what that was like to have that every minute of the day.
--Her mother sold the house in Dorchester and moved to Weymouth. She never set foot in the Back Bay after that. She blamed the city. They were high school sweethearts.
Eileen knew Mama Bear whose name on the whiteboard as the contact person tipped her off that he had no kids of his own. When Marie had sought out his five siblings he’d fielded their pleas. The nine jakes wouldn’t want this, they’d said to him. Don’t let this tragedy defeat you by denying yourself a life. And poor Marie doesn’t deserve it. His mother didn’t speak to him for a month. She’d loved Marie like a daughter. Though she lived with him in the four room house, cooking his meals and doing his laundry, she pretended he wasn’t there. For so long, for decades, he was sure he’d made the right decision. But he’d never been hurt again, not so much as a scratch. A few close calls but nothing more. Marie was right. He could have had a dozen kids and returned home after every shift. He’d played it safe and lost. But at least Marie had saved herself.
--That damn fire, Eileen said, did a lot of damage for generations.
He nodded. His mother died ten years later and never mentioned it again. At the firehouse the jakes had kidded him about Marie. They had rings through their noses and sooner or later he would too. But he loved his freedom too much, they figured, a stubborn Irish bachelor. It’d take a mighty ax to fell that oak.
He didn’t read the papers he was signing. He didn’t care. The weight of her hand warmed him. He hadn’t had enough of that. It always startled him at first, being touched, until he gave into it. He hoped she’d leave it there. The heat passing through his skin was better than any drug. He took his time signing his name. When he was done she gathered up the papers and poked her head out the door.
--Here they come for you now.
--In memory of John F. Heaney
Dennis Donoghue
Russell missed his back scratcher. The hospital had given him a drug for the itch caused by other drugs but nothing worked like his back scratcher. The diagnosis was late stage melanoma, as explained to him six months ago not by the surgeon who confused him but by Mama Bear, the niece who took care of him. Another niece, Baby Bear, also took care of him but Mama Bear, being a nurse herself, was the more involved of the two. As he’d always been a fighter his surgeon was happy to oblige, taking bits and pieces before moving on to his right ear and a chunk off the top of his skull the size of a quarter. Twenty years ago he’d lost his right eye when he’d driven off the road so when conversing he had to turn his head to see and hear who was speaking to him. With the one ear his eyeglasses wouldn’t stay straight on his face. Now he was being transferred from his local hospital in Dorchester to Mass Eye and Ear in Boston where they’d done the surgery. An infection had set in and he didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know what that meant. His run-of-the-mill anxiety had given way to a kind as aggressive as the cancer that had him begging for a pain pill ten minutes after he’d received one. And, to top it off, he couldn’t go to the bathroom. He didn’t want an enema but something had to be done. He moved up and down the length of the hospital corridor with his walker, hoping that might help. More than anything he wanted to return to his two room apartment on the third floor of the Atria with a view of the Neponset River he swam in as a kid. He wanted to watch college football in his recliner and shoot the breeze with his friends in the dining room, many of whom he’d grown up with.
While recovering from the amputation Russell pleaded with Mama Bear and Baby Bear and anyone else who’d listen to go to the firehouse up the street and have a piece of apparatus dispatched to take him home. Staring at hospital walls weeks running did that to you. A month before the surgery he’d lost his beloved sister and was still reeling. The six of them had stayed close, a miracle in itself, given their childhood.
“They’ll be here in an hour,” said Eileen, one of the floor nurses.
If possible he liked to be dressed whenever transported by ambulance. From his U. S. Marine travel bag he pulled out a pair of khakis, plaid boxer shorts, a white tee shirt, white cotton socks, a gray hooded sweatshirt with a zipper. Though once a Marine always a Marine he’d hated his time with them, the vindictive orders and the way he’d been spoken to for no reason other than spite. He’d swung only after he’d been swung at which was why he’d never risen above the rank of corporal. Though far from perfect and suspicious of people unlike himself, he’d met all kinds during his hospital stays who were unfailingly good to him, leaving him to conclude he’d been duped to think a certain way.
No matter how Russell spun it he was close to the end, eighty-two years old the day after Christmas. He pushed aside the overbed table with the covered dish of meatloaf and green beans. After pulling on his khakis, he tugged four notches down his belt, one for every ten pounds. He tucked in the tee shirt, zippered the sweatshirt, combed what hair he had left on his head. In the lobby of the Atria hung a framed photo of him along with other residents-- men and women alike--under the heading Heroes. A folded American flag in a triangular glass case was mounted beneath as if it had come off a coffin. He didn’t consider himself courageous, just someone who’d done what any decent person would have done in the situation in which he’d found himself. Training for the Boston Fire Department he’d hauled a two hundred pound dummy down an aerial ladder. He’d once weighed two-fifty. Better never to have been strong, to have relied on your body for your livelihood, expecting it to be there. He wouldn’t have missed it had he sat behind a desk all day. Still, he had more to lose. A week ago he’d had some kind of stroke. His face drooped and went numb. They’d told him Bell’s Palsy. Whatever it was, it wasn’t going away. The cancer piled on--infections, inflammations, tumors, you name it. The drugs numbed the symptoms, the news all bad, which was why his anxiety was off the charts. They’d kept him going and now the bag of tricks was empty.
He put his teeth in and slipped on his white sneakers with Velcro straps. You could lose a ton of weight and still have the same shoe size. His watch spun on his wrist. Once he’d eaten anything put in front of him, even hospital food. Still, he was better off than some. Had it not been for Mama Bear and Baby Bear God knows where he’d be. But he could be stubborn and unappreciative. Pain did that to you. He would apologize to Mama Bear and later Baby Bear when she spelled Mama Bear. At times when he called Mama Bear she wouldn’t answer the phone. She worked nights in the ER in the same hospital he was about to leave and stowed his pills in a tackle box under the sink in his apartment, never worrying he’d get into it because if he tried he’d end up on the floor. There would be no more surgeries but there were still drugs though hospitals were stingy, as if he was some kind of addict. Whenever they were late with his dose or denied him outright when he told them it wasn’t enough, Mama Bear would chase down the floor nurse or attending physician. Mama Bear, besides being a nurse, had grown up in the same neighborhood and wasn’t one to cross. A week ago she’d cornered a young resident until a nurse stepped between them.
Except for the pain, he wasn’t desperate. He’d had a full life. The children of the nine jakes had grandchildren of their own now. He’d been standing on the sidewalk beside the Hotel Vendome holding a coiled firehose while others were on the fifth floor engaged in ax and rake duty. It was mopup time, the fire in the unoccupied hotel under control. Engine 7, the piece of apparatus on which he’d spent his career as driver and pump operator, idled on Dartmouth Street. When the five floors of the southeast corner collapsed, sixteen jakes went with them. There was a roar and then nothing for what seemed like ages. Russell hesitated a moment, as if waiting to be told what he’d just seen. Not ten feet away, the collar of a jake’s rubber coat stuck out from the rubble. Reflexively, he scaled the pile and held on to it for dear life, excavating debris with his free hand--pieces of brick, twisted rebar, hunks of mortar. He didn’t release his hold even when Cambridge Rescue arrived with cables thick enough to lift one floor off another. He clung to the collar until the tension of the cable sent him ass over tea kettle. Cut up and dizzy, he didn’t recognize his own blood until someone mentioned it. He’d taken the buried jake with him, pulled him loose with a mad tug that wrenched his shoulder from its socket. He came out of the hole covered head to toe in soot as if he’d been shot out of a chimney.
With the weight loss his dentures were too big for his mouth. One eye, one ear, horse teeth and almost no hair on his head. The ladies would take a pass, thank you. He’d been going steady with Marie until twenty-three children were left fatherless. The morning of the funeral for the nine at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross was when he was discharged from Boston City. He put on his uniform and went directly to the Mass and stood in a pew with the other jakes. He said his prayers and listened to the eulogies. He hadn’t given Marie a ring because he didn’t have the money. But it was a foregone conclusion. They’d spoken of the future. Everyone said how great they were together, what beautiful children they would have with her olive skin and his green eyes. Other than the shoulder, he was fine. And he told everyone he was fine. His mother who came to live with him after her legs gave out begged him to quit when she took one look at him in the hospital bed.
--What kind of job kills nine of you in the blink of an eye? And those poor children without fathers over a wreck of a building that should have been let burn to the ground.
During the Mass celebrated by Archbishop Humberto Medeiros he vowed he’d never do that, leave his children fatherless. When he informed Marie she waited a month for him to change his mind before she sent him packing. In any line of work there was risk, she cried. You could get killed crossing the street. What about cops and coal miners and power linemen? They had armies of kids, didn’t they? She didn’t make a dent.
Well he couldn’t do anything about it now. He was down to months, weeks at the rate he was going. A year ago they’d stenciled his nickname The Bull on the cab of Engine 7, the young jakes gathered around him at the firehouse as if he was Babe Ruth or Vince Lombardi. There was a plaque with his name embedded in a rock out back alongside a granite bench. They broke the mold, someone said. Never see another one like him. Nothing made him happier than giving his time and money to fellow veterans and jakes. He could sling it with the best of them so he was easy to be around, witty and genial, the perfect combination, a few words all it took to pull you in. He’d wondered what the young jakes thought of him with his glass eye and one ear, well on his way to skin and bones. It wasn’t like the old days when his was the busiest firehouse in the city. There was better detection now and strict building code inspections. It was safer but hardly firefighting. You rode inside a heated cab and breathed air from a tank on your back. But you still had the drug crazies, the ones who wanted to kill you for showing up to save them, the drunk kids sawed out of overturned cars at three in the morning, the three deckers without smoke detectors going up in minutes.
He had to take something for his anxiety. Nights destroyed him, the dreams terrifying. Mindeating hallucinations, a full ten minutes to get his bearings. Every hour he woke up and clutched the bed rail. Just dreams but good Jesus they were bad. Side effects he was told. Days he could manage with the natural light and people to talk to. He read The Herald and watched sports and the news. Nights finished him. And it was almost night now. In a short while he’d be on Storrow Drive on his way to Mass Eye and Ear. Passing by The Esplanade he’d tell the EMTs how he’d met George H.W. Bush after Marine One landed there for an event at the Park Plaza. He was on fire detail and shook his hand. Bush was born in Milton and loved the Red Sox. His favorite player was Ted Williams. When Bush asked him when the Sox would win a World Series again, he’d said, “The year after both of us are gone.” They’d laughed and the President embraced him. He felt like some big shot. The black and white photograph was tacked on the wall of his apartment. He’d been so stunned he hadn’t taken off his glove. They’d laughed about that at the firehouse. Who did he think he was shaking hands with, the bartender at J.J. Foley’s?
His brother who had five kids had been a firefighter not in Boston but a small town on the South Shore where there were no hotels to fall on you. After Marie there’d been women here and there but nothing serious. They’d never gotten far enough to discuss it. He could imagine their reaction. He never mentioned the fire unless someone brought it up, like the nephew who was doing a research paper for his American history class and wanted a primary source, reminding him he had a place in Boston history. He’d dismissed it, saying he would have done the same thing. But the nephew corrected him.
--You put your personal safety last for the sake of someone in need. That’s the definition of a hero.
The night he lost his eye he hadn’t remembered what happened. He’d been drinking but was okay, a couple under his limit. They’d found him in the woods. Maybe a deer or black ice. He’d awoken in a hospital bed. He wondered if death was like that. He’d wonder where he was, where the pain had gone, and be told he had died. He hoped it was like that anyway. The nine jakes didn’t feel much. They were dead by the time anyone got to them. He prayed for them every day, forty-six years and counting. The smooth rubber of the collar was still in his grasp. The jake was from a firehouse on the other side of the city but whenever they crossed paths he said, “You saved my life you SOB but you tore my favorite overcoat.” It was a joke between them. He loved that, the ribbing they gave one another. You couldn’t talk that way anymore. He wouldn’t last ten minutes in this day and age. People could take a joke back then.
They’d told him surgery would slow down the cancer. For that he’d given up his ear. Now it was killing him. Two or three times a day one of the Bears changed the dressing which flopped off the side of his head. He looked as if he’d taken a cannonball. And for what? At the time he’d thought maybe a year but he’d heard what he’d wanted to hear. There’d be no prosthetic ear. If the infection went away maybe, or if he was younger. Half the time he didn’t wear his eye anyway. The choppers were a nuisance. He didn’t want an ear. Something else that wouldn’t fit him properly.
He sat on the bed and waited. No cause had been found. The hotel had lost its structural integrity after years of code violations during renovations. It was primed to come down. But for the fact he was three feet closer to the street he would have gone the way of the nine jakes. For the last forty-six years he’d played with house money. His nephew got an A on the paper, the teacher writing, “Wow, an honest-to-goodness primary source--and hero to boot!”. Would he be willing to speak to the class? He said yes though he wouldn’t. He knew what would happen when he got up there in front of a bunch of high school kids. They’d expect him in a cape. He’d get to talking and it would come back--the silence, what it was like to hear nothing at all, every bit of sound devoured, an absolute stillness that included his own breath. He would describe a spooky vacuum, a void from some distant corner of the universe. He’d never experienced anything like it even after the jets he’d refueled in Korea cut their turbines. The kids would shuffle their feet and clear their throats. He was scaring the shit out of them. He’d glance at the teacher and end by telling them the building only did what it was supposed to do, as the investigation later found out. It was just a case of bad timing.
The ambulance had reached the hospital. He could walk on his own but per regulations they’d strap him to a gurney. He used the bathroom to pee and check himself in the mirror. Mama Bear would meet him downstairs. Having been a nurse for many years she understood hospitals. If the BFD was run like one the city would burn down overnight. The time he’d fallen in the lobby of the Atria no one could help him up, not the nurse on duty, the CNAs, not even the custodian who had him under the arms until he was instructed to lay him back down until the EMTs arrived. They’d lifted him and he’d walked unassisted to the dining room. God help you if you went beyond your job description. These days he’d be fired for reaching for that jake’s collar. It was someone else’s job to save his life. Just as well he wasn’t going to be around forever. His sister had passed away in a large airy room on a summer estate once owned by wealthy Bostonians. The hospice sat on a hill overlooking Hingham Bay where whitetail deer grazed in a wildflower meadow below her window. There were no beeping sounds, IVs or harsh lighting, no one prodding you every ten minutes and then ignoring you for hours. When he came to say goodbye he was struck by the tranquility of the place. The staff arrived only to change her bedding, place a few drops of morphine under her tongue, offer words of comfort. They were from some religious order, or so it seemed. During his visit a nurse told him God was present. She touched his arm and spoke as if God had just walked in from the parking lot. But he’d felt something. He couldn’t say what exactly. His sister was dying and yet she was fine. And he was fine too. The feeling stayed with him as his nephew drove him home. Even after it left he remembered it. That was enough, to know it had been there. He guessed the Bears had discussed the next step, practicing what to say and how to say it, picking a day to introduce the topic. Short of his surgeon pulling a miracle drug out of his fanny, that discussion was coming sooner rather than later. But not right now. He didn’t have to worry. Maybe there’d be a cure for cancer in the meantime, some targeted therapy he’d read about. Maybe he’d be saved. He could hope at least. As bad as he was, he wanted to stay around for a while.
He’d known the nine jakes though they weren’t from his firehouse. They all knew one another. Three had put in a furnace and boiler for him, muscling it through the small bulkhead to the other end of the cellar. They’d saved him a fortune. They all had side jobs to make ends meet. On and off through the years he’d seen the twenty-three kids at fundraisers and memorials. Some had sought him out, wanting to know what he could tell them. They’d turned out fine, most of them, even after the mothers remarried. Marie had seven kids of her own, three boys and four girls. She was a grandmother. He’d kept track. He’d seen her out and about but kept his distance. Given the circumstances he thought it best. He could imagine what the nine jakes would have said. Why didn’t we ask you before we knocked up our wives? What the hell were we thinking?
Eileen brought him release papers to sign. He put his Marine travel bag on the overbed table.
--My father was a Marine, she said. My grandfather too. Now my son wants to enlist. I wouldn’t mind so much if wars didn’t go on forever.
--If he goes to college he won’t have to dig a trench for no reason and have his mother’s reputation questioned in front of a whole platoon.
--Okay, I’ll let him know. Someone at the nurses’ station googled you. She does that to everyone. My aunt’s father died at that fire. She still remembers the phone call in the middle of the night. He’d just started his shift. She was only four and had a two year old brother.
He nodded when she mentioned the jake’s name. She placed a hand on his shoulder. She was a friendly nurse unafraid to touch her patients. She apologized for his pain. She couldn’t imagine what that was like to have that every minute of the day.
--Her mother sold the house in Dorchester and moved to Weymouth. She never set foot in the Back Bay after that. She blamed the city. They were high school sweethearts.
Eileen knew Mama Bear whose name on the whiteboard as the contact person tipped her off that he had no kids of his own. When Marie had sought out his five siblings he’d fielded their pleas. The nine jakes wouldn’t want this, they’d said to him. Don’t let this tragedy defeat you by denying yourself a life. And poor Marie doesn’t deserve it. His mother didn’t speak to him for a month. She’d loved Marie like a daughter. Though she lived with him in the four room house, cooking his meals and doing his laundry, she pretended he wasn’t there. For so long, for decades, he was sure he’d made the right decision. But he’d never been hurt again, not so much as a scratch. A few close calls but nothing more. Marie was right. He could have had a dozen kids and returned home after every shift. He’d played it safe and lost. But at least Marie had saved herself.
--That damn fire, Eileen said, did a lot of damage for generations.
He nodded. His mother died ten years later and never mentioned it again. At the firehouse the jakes had kidded him about Marie. They had rings through their noses and sooner or later he would too. But he loved his freedom too much, they figured, a stubborn Irish bachelor. It’d take a mighty ax to fell that oak.
He didn’t read the papers he was signing. He didn’t care. The weight of her hand warmed him. He hadn’t had enough of that. It always startled him at first, being touched, until he gave into it. He hoped she’d leave it there. The heat passing through his skin was better than any drug. He took his time signing his name. When he was done she gathered up the papers and poked her head out the door.
--Here they come for you now.
