by F. P. Lione
We crossed West Street and walked south. I noticed no one was talking, just looking around in shock, not believing that we were actually in downtown Manhattan. It looked like a war zone. We got a closer look at the piece of the Trade Center that was imbedded in the building next to us.
The building was hot and dusty. I took off my paper mask. Some of the cops had them on, but the masks were so full of dust now they were useless anyway. All they did was make your face sweat so that you were tasting the dust in your sweat, and there was so much dust seeping through the mask, clogging it up on us. FD had long abandoned their Scott Packs, which only gave them about forty-five minutes of air. After that they were deadweight.
We used flashlights to see our way up the flights of stairs and got off at each floor to search. The building had been evacuated, but it had explosion damage and was filled with debris. The windows had imploded from the collapse, and parts of the building were crushed.
We searched each room, looking under desks and in closets, calling out to see if anyone was in there. As we finished each floor we marked it off with a big X in orange spray paint, closed it off with caution tape, and went up to the next one.
It was almost 4:00 in the afternoon now, and we were exhausted. I’d been up for over twenty-four hours and on my feet for close to seventeen hours, but I didn’t want to stop. I wanted them to get the backhoes in here and start digging it out. We had such a small window of opportunity to find someone alive here, and so far I hadn’t seen anyone survive this. I think deep down I knew the search was futile. I hoped it wasn’t, but I thought it was.
I was having trouble handling all this, and I was a little concerned about Walsh and Rooney. Walsh looked dazed and Rooney had been trying to get through to someone on his cell phone, I guess his wife. I wondered if the antenna on top of the tower being gone was interrupting all the communications. Rooney dialed the number again. Then he went nuts, screaming and yelling about the phone as he smashed it on the ground. Then it hit me. Rooney’s wife was a stewardess.
“Mike, was Jodi working today?” I asked him. I saw it dawn on Joe.
“That’s right, she’s a stewardess,” Joe said.
“She’s a flight attendant, Joe. They don’t call them stewardesses anymore, Jodi gets mad when I call them stewardesses,” Rooney said. “And yes, she was working. She was on standby at Newark.”
“Who does she work for?” I asked, thinking maybe someone saw what kind of plane went in.
“Continental,” he said.
I know Joe well enough to know he was praying without letting anyone know; he nods his head slightly as he focuses his eyes on something.
We finished searching the building, giving a yell again as we passed the floors we already searched.
I lit a cigarette when I got back outside. The fog from the smoke was in the air, and visibility was probably only about fifty feet, so we didn’t see a chief as he approached us.
“Where you from?” he asked. He was making the rounds, taking inventory of who was missing and who was accounted for.
We all gave our commands and our sergeants. Hanrahan told him we had worked a midnight and we’d been here since the second plane hit. He asked if we’d been in touch with our command, and Hanrahan said, “Yeah, everyone’s accounted for.”
He told us about the businesses in the area that were opening their doors with food and water. Also, showers were available at Manhattan Community College, and Verizon was giving out working cell phones over at St. Andrews Church.
We heard a rumble, and I thought it was the fighter jets again until someone yelled, “It’s coming down, it’s coming down!” Someone grabbed my arm and pulled as we ran for our lives again.
When we were far enough away I turned to see 7 World Trade Center, where the bunker was, collapsing. I knew the building had been evacuated—the whole area was evacuated—so at least no one died there. The building had been burning without any kind of extinguishment for hours.
I watched as the plumes of smoke and dust belched out where the almost-fifty-story building once stood. It was supposed to be indestructible, the city’s nerve center in case anything catastrophic ever happened to New York.
Now it just looked like every other pile of crap here.
17
As the sun went down, the whole area was enveloped with a sense of doom. There were massive piles of rubble, some as many as twenty stories high. Sections of the buildings that had fallen were embedded in the ground, and the lights hooked up to the portable generators cast ugly shadows on the skeletal remains.
The embedded pieces actually confused me, some stood straight up and I couldn’t tell if they were part of the original building or if that was how it fell. I tried to picture the towers the way they looked before.
A lot of people don’t realize it, but the Trade Center complex is like a small city. It’s got four subway stations, TV and radio stations, banks, a mall, parking garages, hundreds of businesses, bars, and restaurants. It’s even got a drug store open twenty-four hours a day, or at least it did until this morning.
I was just here a few weeks ago with Denise. She called me on a Tuesday morning when I had collared up to meet her for lunch. Over the summer there are free concerts for lunch and dinner at the plaza that separates the two towers. They’d recently renovated it, and there was a huge gold-and-black ball fountain in the center of the plaza. I forget the name of the band we saw, but I know they sang the song “Wild Thing.”
We’d been coming here since we were kids, cutting out of school and taking the ferry downtown. When I was in high school I got an A in photography for a black-and-white picture I took of the towers. I remember lying on the ground to get the whole thing in one shot. The teacher loved it; he even made a copy for himself. In fact, I still have the picture. I found it awhile back when I was going through some boxes.
As kids we loved to watch the window-washing machine go up and down, thinking what a cool job that must be. The towers stretched so far up into the sky that on a cloudy day, the tops of the buildings would disappear. And in the winter it was so cold up there that snowfall would turn into rain before it hit the street.
The day I met Denise for the concert, I finished with the ADA around 10:30 and took the train downtown. She brought us sandwiches, and I remember how packed it was with people for the concert in spite of the heat.
Now I watched as groups of workers, mostly firefighters with cops mixed in, were spread throughout the site, picking through whatever they could lift, searching for survivors, and I realized I’d never see those towers again. It was all gone. And I knew nothing was ever gonna be the same again.
We joined back in with the search, plugging away as we prayed for a moan or cry that would signal someone was alive.
EMS had set up a triage on Chambers and West streets, and the paramedics were assisting people. We stopped and had a paramedic help wash out our eyes. He gave us a bottle of wash to take with us.
We were starting to hear bits and pieces of what happened from people who had talked to their families. We now knew that a total of four planes had been hijacked, the two that hit the Trade Center, one that hit the Pentagon, and one that crashed somewhere in Pennsylvania. I tried not to think about the fact that my mother lives in Pennsylvania, and no one seemed to know where the plane crashed.
We were beyond exhaustion now as we made our way over to Manhattan Community College to take showers. I tried Michele again, getting the “All circuits are busy” line again. It was hit or miss with the phones, so I figured I’d try again after I took a shower.
There wasn’t much we could do about our clothes, so we clapped them and shook them to get the dust off. I could feel the stinging of cuts on my arms and hands as I showered off, and my eyes burned as I let the water run on them. It felt like I had sand in them, and every time I rubbed them they would tear.
After drying off and putting my filthy clothes back on, I used the phone at the college and finally got in t
ouch with Michele.
“Oh, thank God,” she sobbed. “Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m still downtown. We’re taking showers at Manhattan College, and I was actually able to get through. I’ve been trying on and off all day,” I said. “Did you talk to anyone?”
“I talked to your mother, and I told her Donna talked to Joe, but she wants me to call her as soon as I talk to you. I talked to Denise a few times . . .”
“Did she hear from Nick?”
I heard her pause. “No. At least, the last time I talked to her she hadn’t spoken to him.”
“What about my brother?” Vinny was an electrician, and he worked jobs all around the city, so he could’ve been anywhere.
“I know Denise talked to him. He’s worried about you.”
“How’s Stevie handling all this?” I asked, worried about him being scared.
“He doesn’t really understand it. He seems to be taking his cues from me. He asked if I was scared, and I said no but that we need to be praying right now. And he did, he prayed for you and Joe and everyone else in the world.” She paused. “He was more worried that I was mad at you and he wouldn’t see you anymore.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I told him that just because I was mad it didn’t mean we wouldn’t see you anymore.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“I’m so sorry, Tony. I shouldn’t have done that to you. You were trying to call and work this out, and I was purposely ignoring you. If you had died there, that’s the last memory I would have of you, and I realized how horrible I’ve been.”
If I wasn’t so exhausted and this wasn’t so serious, I probably would have enjoyed seeing her grovel a little. Instead, I said. “I love you, and I’m sorry. You come first from here on in, babe, before the family, before everything,” I said.
“You too,” she said.
“Tell Stevie that I called and that I love him.”
“I will.”
“Did anybody hear from my father?” My father worked over in the federal court building, and as far as I knew they were safe over there.
“Denise heard from him this afternoon. As far as I know he was fine. I think she said he was staying at work, that they were locking down the building.” When I didn’t say anything, she said, “He’s worried about you. Denise said he called the precinct and found out they sent people down.”
“But as far as you know everyone’s okay, right?” I asked.
When she didn’t answer me right away I knew something had happened. “Who’s not okay?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Tony. Denise said something about your cousin Gino, the one you call Brother.”
“He works on Wall Street,” I said dismissively. “As far as I know they were fine over there. He probably just couldn’t get in touch with anyone yet.”
“Denise said he worked in the Trade Center,” she said quietly. “Denise was at their house today when she called here, she said he worked in the South Tower.”
“I thought he worked on Wall Street,” I said, feeling dread seep into me. “What floor was he on?”
“I think the eighty-eighth or eighty-ninth,” she said.
“Do you have their number?” I asked. I wanted to call my aunt and see if maybe they got their information mixed up.
“No, but if you want to call me right back, I’ll call Denise on her cell phone.”
“Yeah, I’ll call you right back.”
“Joe,” I called and waved him over. “My cousin Gino worked in the South Tower,” I said, starting to panic. “And Denise hasn’t heard from Nick.”
“Nick may not have been able to get to a phone yet,” he said.
“We did,” I said. I noticed he didn’t say anything about Gino. If he worked on the eighty-eighth or eighty-ninth floor, he was probably dead.
“Who are you calling?” he asked as I dialed again.
“Michele. She’s getting my aunt’s number from Denise.”
I wrote the number on my hand and talked to Michele for a few minutes. I didn’t want to hang up. The sound of her voice was the best thing about this day, but I knew I had to get back out there.
I called my aunt’s house, and my cousin Paulie picked up. “Paulie, it’s Tony,” I said.
“Tony,” he said and started to cry. “Brother was in the South Tower.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yeah, my mother called him when the first plane hit.”
“Did he get out?” If he knew the first plane hit, he had time to get out.
“I don’t think so, Tony. He told my mother his building was okay. He didn’t realize what was going on. He said some friggin’ moron flew his plane into the other building, he figured it was an accident. He would have been right where the second plane hit.”
“Can I talk to Aunt Elena?” I asked.
“She’s not good, Tony, they had to give her something,” he said. “Little Gina too. Hold on, Grandma’s here, she wants to talk to you.”
“Tony, thank God you’re safe.” I could hear her start to cry, but she couldn’t talk, and she gave the phone back to Paulie.
“Tony, how could this happen?” Paulie said, still crying. He went into a tirade and said he was going to hunt down whoever did this. This was too much for me to deal with right now and I told him I had to go and I’d get over there as soon as I could.
When I got off the phone, Joe was talking to a cop from the North precinct whose brother was a Jersey state trooper. He said he finally got in touch with his brother, who told him that supposedly a truck full of explosives was stopped trying to go over the George Washington Bridge from Jersey into Manhattan. He said the feds swooped in and took the passengers and the truck.
“Can you believe that?” Joe asked, throwing his arms up in the air.
“What else are they looking to do?” I asked, shaking my head.
Another cop, a female, was telling us that a panel truck had been parked about a block down from the firehouse in the West Village with a mural painted on it of a city with a plane about to crash into one of the buildings. He said two men, the driver and the passenger, were detained and the truck was checked for explosives.
I listened as I taped up a gash on my thumb, not knowing whether any of this was true and if it was true, how long was something like this planned without us knowing?
Within minutes of going back outside we were full of dust and soot, but at least the shower woke us up. We went back to sifting through the debris, with the smoke and the darkness working against us and the smell of burnt cement stuck in our throats. The sound of generators filled the air and hummed as they lit up the perimeter.
Around 1:00 in the morning we made our way back to the van, not talking, just trudging through, with our footsteps sending up small puffs of dust as we walked. The van was still parked with the swarm of emergency vehicles on Chambers and Broadway and was covered with a couple inches of dust, paper, and bits and pieces of debris.
The mood was somber on the ride back to the precinct. Everyone was quiet and either leaned back against the seat or had their head down as they rested their arms on their knees.
Walsh was sitting next to me, and he started to lose it, taking deep breaths as he fought back sobs. I looked at him and saw that he had turned around and was looking back toward the Trade Center. I looked back with him, seeing the entire tip of Manhattan consumed in smoke, with the buildings obscured by the thick clouds, as if all of downtown were burning.
“It’s all right, buddy,” Joe said. “We got through this, and you’re gonna sign out tonight.” But that seemed to make it worse, and Walsh’s shoulders shook as he heaved big sobs.
I turned my head back and looked at the familiar sights of the West Side Highway, and except for the fact that the streets were empty and there wasn’t a soul in sight, everything looked the same. Even though it wasn’t. There were no towers to light up the sky, just generator-powered spotlights that got lost
in the dust and the smoke.
We parked the van on the corner of 9th Avenue and walked up 35th Street. When we opened the doors I was surprised in a detached way at the amount of hustle in the precinct. The midnights are pretty quiet, and it seemed as busy as the day tour. The phones were ringing and people were moving, but when they realized we were standing there the whole area by the desk got quiet.
They were staring at us, and I saw Terri Marks’s eyes fill up with tears.
“You okay, Joe?” she asked.
He looked like she was interrupting wherever his mind was and nodded yes, kind of like when you don’t understand someone and just nod to let them think you do.
I didn’t understand why everyone was staring, and then I realized how we must have looked to them. We were filthy, and our rumpled clothes were covered in dust. The showers we took down at the college had long worn off. Our hair was messed from being dried with a towel and sooty from the ash sticking to our damp heads. We had five o’clock shadows, me and Joe more than anyone, but I think it was the vacant stare that I noticed the most. We looked shocked and worn out as we tried to get our thoughts together to deal with everyone. I looked over at Walsh to see if he was okay, and he looked so much older to me than he did this morning.
Then they seemed to converge on us all at once, hugging us and slapping our backs. They were telling us how they saw us on TV right as the South Tower was falling. They said that it looked like the tower fell on us and they all thought we were dead.
“Good man,” Vince Puletti said as he hugged me. “Ya’s are good men. And women,” he added for Noreen.
I heard someone yelling in the room down the hallway past the desk. It was an angry yell, and it took me a minute to realize that the voice belonged to my father. I looked at Terri, and I guess she could see the confusion on my face.
“He got here a few hours ago,” she said. “We told him you were okay, but he didn’t believe us. He went down to the Trade Center to look for you.”
