Clear Blue Sky

by F. P. Lione

  “Then I’ll give you a bag of ice, and you can leave it in the van. This way at least you’ll have something to eat down there.”

  She had a point. Yesterday the stores downtown were donating food, but there’s been no power for almost twenty-four hours, and there might be nothing for the whole twelve-hour tour. This way at least we could walk over to the van and grab a sandwich.

  Geri had some bacon made on the grill, and she had Walsh cutting the rolls and Rooney helping her fry the eggs.

  I made the coffees, using the biggest cups she had and adding milk and sugar all around.

  Since she didn’t get rolls delivered, the hundred sandwiches were on regular white bread and rye.

  She had them marked “turkey and cheese,” “roast beef and muenster,” “baloney and cheese,” and “ham and cheese.”

  “Ger, can I get a pack of Marlboro Lights?” I said.

  “Me too,” Rooney said.

  She took a cardboard box, stuffed in the egg sandwiches and about ten cold-cut sandwiches, and threw in six packs of cigarettes, gum, and candy bars. She put the coffee in carry trays and filled up another box with bottles of water, juice, and soda. She went into the freezer and threw a bag of ice over the drinks and added a bunch of napkins to the sandwiches.

  “What do we owe you?” I asked, too out of it to even try to calculate it. Even if the sandwiches were free, there was a lot of stuff here.

  She shook her head. “Don’t insult me. Your money’s no good here.”

  When we started to argue she started yelling, “Don’t try to argue with me, and just take the stuff. It’s the least I can do. If anybody comes in here saying you’re taking stuff for nothing, they can deal with me.”

  We thanked her while she told us to be careful and we better stop on our way back to let her know we were okay.

  On the ride downtown it looked pretty much the same as it did yesterday, covered in smoke. There was a light wind blowing, sending the smoke toward Brooklyn. The strangest thing was there was no one on the streets, making the whole area seem abandoned. I started to panic for a second, thinking yesterday was the warm-up and they’d be moving in for the kill today while we were reeling from this.

  The closer we got to the Trade Center, we could see the buildings and sidewalks covered with powder. The streets were still clogged with vehicles, some abandoned, others destroyed.

  We parked on Chambers, closer to the water, and walked over toward West and Vesey again, reliving everything we saw yesterday.

  When we got to West and Vesey, we saw that the different city agencies were already arriving. There were payloaders and backhoes, as well as flatbeds from Sanitation, the Department of Traffic, and the DEP to move the vehicles blocking the roads out of the outer perimeter and clear the roadways as much as they could for the heavy equipment we’d need for rescue.

  “Look,” I said to Joe, nodding toward a ladder company from the Weehawken Fire Department in New Jersey.

  “Wow. I never thought I’d see that,” he said.

  “Home of the Indians,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Right before you go into the Lincoln Tunnel you can see the Weehawken Little League fields. There’s a sign that says, ‘Welcome to Weehawken Stadium, Home of the Indians.’”

  I’ve lived in New York all my life, and I’ve never seen another fire department backing up FDNY. They’ve gone out to other departments that didn’t have the resources they did, but they’ve never needed help before. I felt touched that the guys from Weehawken came to help us, and I guess in a way stronger, like we weren’t alone in this.

  When we got to the command post, we found out that teams were working from Liberty and West and Vesey and West, with the two locations separated by one block, a mountain of debris, and a portion of the South Tower that was impaled in the ground and bowed over West Street, making it impossible to see up or down it.

  Joe’s cell phone rang about 6:00 a.m., and I could tell by his face he didn’t recognize the number. He was saying, “What? On West and Vesey, who’s this?” He squinted as he tried to hear.

  “Who was that?”

  “I don’t know, I couldn’t hear them.”

  “What was the number?”

  He read it off. Somewhere downtown.

  About ten minutes later I heard Romano calling mine and Joe’s names. He looked banged up and worn out, and his eyes had that haunted look everyone down here had. He choked up when he saw us, like when you’re a kid and you fall down and hurt yourself but you hold it in until you see your mother. We all lost it then. I was so happy to see him I couldn’t hold it in, and Joe and I went to grab for him at the same time.

  “Come here, I’ll kiss your dirty face, you scungili,” Joe was saying, crying and hugging him. “Oh, it’s good to see you, buddy. Thank God. Thank God.”

  “Did you let my sister know you’re alive?” I asked, hugging him.

  “Yeah, I finally talked to her about two o’clock.”

  “Hey, boss,” Romano said as Hanrahan grabbed him.

  “We thought you were dead, you rookie,” Rooney said, tearing up.

  “I almost was,” he said. “You have no idea how close I was.”

  “Where were you?” This from Joe.

  “The North Tower. I would have been in there when it fell too.

  I was on my way in, and a chief stopped me and made me help someone out of the building. I wanted to be in there with everyone else.” He had to stop for a second, and he looked at Joe. “But then I was thinking about my daughter and my mother, and Denise,” he added as he looked at me. “On the way in from Brooklyn I was reading that Psalm 91 you told me about.” He pulled Joe’s old little black Bible out of his pants pocket. “I said that prayer you told me to say, about giving his angels charge over me, that no evil will befall me. And when I was helping this woman out of the building I was praying it again, this time that a thousand will fall at my side, and ten thousand at my right hand, and it won’t come near me. I told God I didn’t want to die here and hurt everyone that way. And I made him a promise,” he said, having a hard time talking now. “I told him if he let me make it out, I’d never doubt him again. I said that prayer you told me, the one where I said I know that Jesus died for me and he’s the Son of God and that he’s it for me now.” It was funny how he explained it, but I think he got it right. “And, Joe, we were barely out of the building when it came down, it was like something pushed me from behind.” He locked eyes with Joe. “And the next thing I know, I’m on Church Street in the middle of all that smoke. I know everyone’s gonna think it was the force from the building coming down, but it wasn’t. Someone pushed me.”

  “I believe you,” Noreen surprised me by saying.

  “So do I,” Hanrahan said.

  “Excuse me,” someone said, and we all turned to see four men dressed in jeans, T-shirts, and baseball hats. Two were stocky, maybe five foot ten or five foot eleven, and one was blond and about six foot two, with a marine hair cut. The fourth guy was Hispanic, tall and thin.

  “Can I help you?” Hanrahan said, a little sharp. There were no civilians allowed in the area, and I didn’t know how they got down this far.

  They pulled out their shields, the four of them at once. “They told us the command post was here. We drove up from Miami when we saw the buildings fall,” the blonde said.

  I looked at their shirts and hats again and saw that their PD logo was on the shirts.

  “You got here that fast?” I asked. I knew it was less than twenty-four hours ago, but my mind couldn’t calculate the hours.

  “We grabbed some clothes and money and drove straight through,” the Hispanic cop said. “We only stopped for gas, peed in bottles all the way up.”

  “Does the department know you’re here?” Hanrahan asked, still not getting it.

  “Of course,” the blonde said. I could hear a Southern accent. “What do you need us to do, sir?”

  We all looked at each other, du
mbfounded that these guys drove all the way here to help us.

  “Hang on,” Hanrahan said. “Let me talk to the lieutenant.”

  Romano and the Florida cops stayed with us as we worked on the bucket brigade, working in line, digging what we could and passing the bodies or the parts of them to the next person. The Miami cops had to be as exhausted as we were, but they worked like animals, moving what they could to search, sweating in their now dust-filled clothes.

  Help was coming from people in the area now. Store owners filled up shopping carts with bottles of water, granola bars, cookies, soda, and whatever else they had. Someone actually showed up with a cart full of cigarettes and cigars.

  People were starting to pour into the site now, and everyone worked intensely to look for survivors. We had no idea how many were dead and missing and were still working on the number between five and ten thousand people. Every once in a while all the machinery would be shut down, and we’d call for complete silence to listen for anything beneath the pile that would let us know someone was alive. It was becoming more and more frequent for someone to yell for silence, and within seconds hundreds of people would stop whatever they were doing and give the whole area complete silence. We hadn’t found anyone alive yet, but there was so much to go through.

  We were working in a mixed group—cops and firemen, the Miami boys, Frank from OEM again, and a couple of Port Authority cops. When we found the body of a firefighter, we stepped aside and let FD do the honor of carrying it out.

  We heard “Hats off” again and again, and we stopped what we were doing to kneel in the dust each time a body passed by us. The Miami cops looked confused the first time it happened, but now every time they heard it they put their hats over their chests and knelt down with us.

  Firefighters were coming now from all over Long Island and New Jersey. Romano told us that they had relocated to firehouses throughout the city and were responding to structural alarms for us. By now there were hundreds of volunteers helping out, searching by hand, digging, or working on the bucket brigades.

  Private contractors from around the city were arriving with excavating equipment and machinery. Port-a-Potties were set up, and there was a makeshift mess area with the food from the stores and restaurants.

  We stopped for a smoke and a coffee at the mess area. My feet were swollen in my shoes, and while my feet screamed to get out of my boots, I knew if I took them off I’d never get them back on. I used Joe’s phone to call Michele. I was guessing she was at school. I didn’t ask her, and I had no idea if the schools were even open.

  “Tony, this is so horrible,” she said. “I’m still in shock, I can’t believe this happened.”

  “I know, babe, but it did,” I said, looking around at it. “I’m standing here looking at it, and I can’t believe it happened.”

  “I wish you weren’t there.”

  “I know. I wish I could see you. Ya know, you’re the best part of my life,” I said. “But right now I need to be here.”

  “I know you do,” she said, and I could hear her smile. “I just want to see you.”

  “I have no idea when I can get out there. We’re doing twelve-hour tours with no days off indefinitely,” I said, wondering if I could make it that long without seeing her.

  “Can I come in to see you?”

  “Everything’s closed. Only emergency personnel can get into the city.”

  “Can they do that? How are people supposed to work?”

  “I don’t know, babe,” I said, too tired to have to think that much. “I gotta get back to this. I’ll call you when I get back to the precinct. I love you.”

  “I love you too. Be careful.”

  As soon as I disconnected, the phone rang. I saw the 631 number, showing it was Long Island, so I handed Joe his phone.

  I heard Joe say, “Hey, Dad,” and then walk away from us with the phone.

  “Hey, Miami Vice, you okay there?” I asked. They were starting to look like us now, full of dirt and vacant stares as the reality of it seeped in and became surreal at the same time.

  “This is unbelievable,” the blond marine-looking one said. I know they told us their names, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember them. “I don’t understand how someone could be this evil. What are they getting out of this?”

  “Oh, they’ll be getting plenty,” Rooney said. “Trust me. We won’t lay down for this.”

  “I hope we bomb these frigging lowlife scums,” Romano said, at least that’s what he said after I cleaned it up a little. “I hope we get every last one of them.”

  “We have to figure out who they are first,” Noreen said.

  “Please, it’s the same nut jobs that did it last time. Trust me, they’re bragging about it already,” Hanrahan said. “You ready?” he asked Joe as he walked back over to us.

  At around 2:00 in the afternoon we were working closer to Church Street. Romano was doing a recap of how he was blown away from the building, showing us where he wound up after the building fell.

  I thanked God again for saving Nick. It didn’t matter to me if he was blown away from the building or if an angel pushed him. He was alive and I was thankful.

  Hanrahan got a call on the radio to move us over to Liberty and West Street. We saw the Winter Garden, seeing for the first time the massive damage done to it. The side of the glass dome that faces the North Tower was completely destroyed in the collapse. We heard someone call out, “I think I got something here,” and silence fell over the area.

  A pane of glass fell from about five stories up from one of the surrounding buildings and smashed into a ledge, shattering into pieces. Someone yelled, “It’s coming down,” and we took off running in every direction. One of the Miami cops slipped and fell, dropping his bucket while he looked behind him and ran. Rooney picked him up by the arm and kept running.

  We stood there for a couple of minutes, wondering if it was gonna fall, when from inside the Winter Garden we heard people laughing and yelling and the sound of bottles clanging. The laughing sounded strange, like we hadn’t heard anyone laugh in a long time, and we walked toward it, mesmerized.

  Inside the Winter Garden a bunch of cops had taken over a bar. The place was a shell, with the windows blown out and debris and soot all over the place. There must have been about thirty cops and firemen standing around the bar like it was happy hour.

  The bar had once been either circular or half round, I couldn’t tell. The firemen were in T-shirts and the pants from their gear. They were sweaty and dirty like we were, with their hair dusted white. The cops were in uniform, and like us, they looked like they’d been up for the better part of two days.

  We stood there watching them talk and drink like none of this was going on. There was a chaplain there too, standing there drinking a Heineken.

  “Jim, these men look like they could use a drink,” the chaplain said, giving us a nod.

  “What can I get ya, brother?” the cop behind the bar said.

  Brother. We were all brothers now.

  “I’ll take a beer,” Hanrahan said as we went inside, glass crackling under our feet as we walked.

  “Me too,” Romano said.

  “One for the lady? How about you, sis?” Jim the bartender asked, nodding toward Noreen. It was funny in a way, but when he said that, Noreen tried to tuck her hair back into the clip.

  I saw by Jim’s collar brass he was from the 17th precinct. He wasn’t an old-timer, but he wasn’t a rookie either.

  “I’ll take a beer, thanks,” Noreen said.

  “I’ll have a beer,” Walsh said.

  “Do you boys have any good Irish whiskey?” Rooney asked.

  Jim found an unbroken bottle of whiskey covered with dust. He blew into a dirty shot glass and wiped it on the filthy apron he had tied around his waist. He poured Rooney the shot and wiped the bar, smearing the dirt around before he placed the shot.

  Bishop, Bert, Ernie, and Big Bird all had ice-cold Heinekens, and I was amazed tha
t with the planes crashing and the buildings collapsing there was still ice in that chest keeping the beers cold.

  Jim nodded at Joe and me. “What about you, brothers?”

  “I’ll take a beer,” Joe said.

  “Yeah, me too,” I said, looking at Joe, giving him a nod. He seemed to understand I didn’t need the drink, that it made sense right here and I was okay.

  “And I’d like everyone to meet our brothers here from Miami. John”— Joe motioned toward the blond marine-looking cop— “Rob and Eric”—he pointed at the two stocky cops—“and Herman”—he finished by pointing at the Hispanic cop. “When the towers fell they left Miami and drove all night to come here and help us.”

  A cheer went up in the bar, and everyone came over to the Miami cops and shook their hands and hugged them. Jim the bartender was wiping his eye and shaking his head.

  Jim raised his bottle. “To the Miami PD.”

  “Miami PD,” everyone cheered.

  “And to better days,” the chaplain said. “And the grace and strength of our Lord to get us through these days.”

  “Here, here,” Rooney said, downing his shot.

  The beer was ice cold and tasted delicious. I didn’t wait for the rush to come, for some reason I knew it wouldn’t. I can’t explain it, but I knew I wasn’t gonna struggle with this anymore. These last two days had been the hardest of my life, and I hadn’t stopped once to think of having a drink. The only reason I drank that beer was the same reason Joe and the chaplain did: to let these people escape the death and destruction that was right outside this door. As I watched the chaplain I was thinking, This guy knows Jesus. He wasn’t down here to make himself look good or to try to take advantage of the fear everyone was feeling to get his religious point across. There was no talk of wrath or judgment or the end of the world. He came down here to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty. He wasn’t weak or frail like Hollywood would like to portray a man of God. He was strong enough to stay here all day and all night, sweating and filthy, so he could bless the bodies as they brought them to him and encourage the people digging for them.

  For a little while we pretended the bar wasn’t a blown-out shell and that the smell of death wasn’t hidden in those piles of pulverized rubble. We were running on heart now, hoping against everything that we’d get someone out of here alive. If it wasn’t for that, then we had nothing left to give.