Firehouse (15 page)

Even as that melancholy thought ran through his mind, the two firemen he had sent downstairs decided to come back to look for him; they got to the top of the stairs and called out, and he heard their voices and thereby located the stairs. He yelled at them not to move, and dove through flames, landing at the top of the stairs and then somersaulting down. It was a night he would never forgot, and it made him even warier of encouraging his children in the profession. His view was that if it was a career they wanted, they would have to choose it on their own. After his son's death, though, a number of friends said to John, What do you mean you never encouraged him to be a fireman—he saw the pleasure you took from your job every day of your life, and that's what he wanted.

Vincent Morello, his mother, Pat, sometimes thought, was every bit as strong-willed as his father and every bit as determined to make his own decisions. His mechanical skills and his love of tools had been obvious from the time he was a very young child. His father had done a great many of the repairs around their house, and Vincent had faithfully followed him around, watching him carefully, wanting to help out. By the time he was six or seven, when John would ask for a particular tool, needle-nose pliers or a crescent wrench, say, Vincent would know which one it was and bring it. “It was like I had created a monster,” John Morello liked to say: a mechanical monster.

Being a fireman never seemed to be a possibility, in no small part because Vincent was seriously acrophobic, and firemen, of course, needed to be able to handle great heights without fear. He loved to cook and had even gone to a cooking school for a time, but after working weekends and nights in a restaurant, he decided that he preferred the hours of a mechanic to those of a chef, and he opted for the latter career. In time he went to work for the fire department as a mechanic, eventually making as much as $60,000 a year, with overtime, plus benefits and pension. He worked on Randall's Island, at the shop where all the rigs had to go four times a year for checkups. There he got to know some of the firemen, and the more he hung out with them and heard their stories, the richer their lives seemed to him.

Vincent's wife, Debi, whom he had married in 1990, thought he had become somewhat bored and restless working in the shop, where there was a lack of action and little pressure. He wanted something different. So in 1992 he took the firemen's test, did well, and was put on the waiting list. As he got closer and closer to coming aboard, Debi remembered, he became crankier and crankier, more and more restless in the shop and desperate to become a fireman. When he finally made it, in February 2000, there was the most dramatic change in his personality—she had never seen him so happy. He became a fireman when he was thirty-three, and to do so he took a pay cut of nearly fifty percent. He began by working out of Engine 283 in Brownsville, Brooklyn, then he rotated through 40/35, starting there in January of 2001.

John Morello was pleased that his son was working out of 40/35, because John had broken in there, spending four years at Ladder 35 back in the 1960s. “Dad, there's a guy here who says he worked with you when you were both
firemen
,” Vincent told him. “It's got to be Terry Holden,” John said, mentioning the most senior member of the house, the man who served as de facto house historian and who in 2001 was in his thirty-seventh year at the house. Vincent did very well at his father's old house. He was much admired by the other men because he had made a career switch from a privileged, cushy job to be with them, taking a huge pay cut. In addition, he was a great source of tools and other material. At the fire department it was always a problem requisitioning things through official channels; the system seemed to work as if it had been greased with molasses. But Vincent could cut through the bureaucracy in seconds, with just one phone call to one of his old colleagues. He was a valuable man and a good man: If the rest of them could do some plumbing, some electrical work, and some carpentry, Morello was a whiz at repairing cars. Suddenly the house had one of the best auto mechanics in the city, a man who seemed able to add years of life to the vehicles belonging to the men and their wives.

He was ferociously hardworking as a probie, primarily, Debi Morello thought, because he did not want to be carried by his father's reputation. He observed all probie traditions and completed all probie tasks, including stripping and washing the bedsheets every morning. Once when he came home, Debi told him that the sheets on their beds could use some washing too, but he told her he was done with bedding for the day. Because he was the junior man, he would be asked periodically to check the rigs, which meant checking the tools and the masks. But there he would be, on his back, under the truck, examining the brakes and the suspension. “Vinnie,” Terry Holden would say, “I said check the rig. You don't have to do all that.” And he would nod and agree and say, “Yeah, but I thought I would check this stuff as well.” He was not a man who cut corners.

On the morning of September 11, John and Pat Morello were at their house on Long Island. He was taking a shower when his wife told him that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. They sat around the television set, watching the tragedy unfold, and when the first tower collapsed, John thought,
I hope to God they got all the people out—the civilians and the firemen—because that is the most complete pancake collapse I have ever seen
.

He and Pat drove to Vincent and Debi's house in Queens, a home they shared with their two children, Justin, seven, and Paige, five. That afternoon he stayed on the phone, trying to get information. John called the firehouse and was mistakenly told that Ladder 35 had not responded to the call until 10:30, and that had given him considerable hope. It seemed to guarantee that his son and the men with him had not arrived until well after the worst moments of the collapse. But by 6:00
P.M.
they were all worried. Debi Morello was sure that something was terribly wrong. She was sure that no matter how chaotic the situation, somehow Vincent would have managed at least one quick call. Vincent, she insisted, would have known how worried she would have been. There had been some tense moments that afternoon, with Pat Morello trying to calm her daughter-in-law by saying that Vincent might be too busy to call or perhaps there were no phones, and Debi saying,
I know my husband and he would know I was worried and he would call me
. Early Wednesday morning, John found out from the Manhattan dispatching office that Ladder 35 had gone out not at 10:30 but at 9:14, and that the entire company was missing. It was then that he heard Debi's anguished scream, the scream that seemed to be for everyone who had lost a fireman that day.

Vincent Morello was supposed to have gone off duty on the morning of September 11. However, his relief, John Daniel Marshall, who had been detailed at the last minute from nearby Engine 23, had not yet arrived. That was when Morello had offered Bob Menig a chance to wait relief, something Menig would have gladly done but for his doctor's appointment. When Marshall did arrive at the firehouse, it was just after the second plane had hit. What happened next was not entirely clear given the confusion of the moment and the eventual lack of survivors. Morello was usually with the truck, but when Marshall showed up, Morello lost his slot. But he still wanted to go—his sense of obligation was that strong. (He had just told Menig, by then driving on the Long Island Expressway to his appointment, that it was a big plane that had struck the north tower, and that he could not wait to get down there.) He apparently tried to stay on the truck as an extra man, but, some of the men at the house believe, Captain Callahan, who was in charge of the truck, would not let Morello join them on such a dangerous run. It was not a reflection on Morello. Callahan simply was unwilling to put an extra man at risk. But since labor negotiations had left the engine one man short, Morello knew there would be a vacancy there, and with the permission of Lieutenant Ginley, he jumped aboard. (Because of those last-minute decisions, the house blackboards, which listed who went out on which rig, were slightly wrong, showing Marshall going out on the engine, and Morello, misspelled “Morrello,” on the truck.)

Dan Marshall, the young man who had arrived at the firehouse just as they were leaving, was a stranger to the men there. It is likely that he had been at 40/35 for all of five minutes when he went out on the last run of his life. He tossed a bag on the floor of the house, and then jumped aboard the rig; later they found the bag, which contained his personal things, including his keys and his wallet.

He had grown up in Congers, New York, one of the exurban communities about an hour north of the city. The son of a New York cop who worked in the Bronx, he was an immensely likable young man, thoughtful and balanced, and sensitive to others—“the neighborhood therapist,” recalled his friend Ralph Rivera, “the person who could talk you down from your bad moods, and your worst moments of anger.” When Marshall finished high school, he had done construction work before going out to Colorado. When he returned to Congers, it was with his new wife, Lori.

In the past Dan's father had pushed him to try one of the civil service jobs, and Rivera, his next-door neighbor who worked out of a firehouse in the Bronx, encouraged him to take the fire department test. Rivera, who was a little older than Marshall, had become a fireman in 1987, and he loved the life, the sense of doing something of value; he spoke often and enthusiastically to Marshall of what being a fireman was like, and of how he thought it was the best job in the world. Lori Marshall did not agree. She thought it was far too dangerous, but Rivera was confident that it was the right job for Dan. He would be fine. What could go wrong? he had argued. What could go wrong?

Of the various job options open to Dan Marshall, becoming a firefighter looked to him far and away the best, and he had eventually taken the firemen's test and passed it. He graduated from the academy in 1999, when he was thirty-three. Rivera was not at the graduation, but he saw Marshall later that day, and the only other time he had ever seen him so happy was when his two children, John Jr. and Paige, were born. There was a huge grin on his face, from ear to ear. He had turned out to be a very good fireman, a natural, thought Dennis Fennell, who broke him in at Ladder 27 in the Bronx. Fennell thought him very hardworking and quietly ambitious—“I want to be the best,” Marshall would say.

One of the things that was hard for Dan Marshall's friends to accept about his death was that he had not known the other men with him that day; that he had gone off to so horrendous a fire, surrounded by complete strangers instead of friends. Dennis Fennell wondered whether he had even had time to introduce himself to all of them, and whether anyone with him had even been able to call out his first name when the collapse occurred.

The men went to service after service that fall. Politicians sometimes showed up and spoke, and there was a certain amount of resentment about that. Back at the firehouse afterward, the men would do a very good imitation of the politicians, using their rote phrases like:
On a day when the worst of mankind showed itself, the best of mankind answered it
. Sometimes the house was edgy now, and little things that previously would have gone unnoticed might set the men off. Part of it was the loss of Bruce Gary and Jimmy Giberson, the two men most responsible for setting and controlling the tone of the house. No one had yet taken their places.

The men were all aware of what might have been, especially those who had by chance switched their schedules with men who had died. A few days before the disaster, one of the firemen had been helping Jimmy Giberson cut a huge lock off a bicycle for a man who had lost the key and had come by the firehouse for help. Jimmy had grabbed the Partner saw and was cutting the lock off, when the saw slipped slightly and cut the other fireman's hand, putting him out of action for several days. That accident had quite probably saved his life.

Sometimes they thought of what might have been had the softball team won in the play-offs the week before the attack: then Kevin Bracken, Steve Mercado, David Arce, Mike Boyle, and Jimmy Giberson would have been playing softball and might have missed the call. But who would have gone in their place? All those what-ifs and might-have-beens....

Some three weeks after the events of September 11, workers going through the ruins of the south tower found the body of Bruce Gary under four stories of rubble, near the entrance to the Winter Garden atrium on West Street. From that location and other evidence, the men pieced together as best they could what they thought had happened to Bruce Gary. He had positioned the engine and was waiting there, unsure in a crisis this great what his role would be, when another fireman, without his equipment, had come by. Apparently Gary had lent the man his gear. Then Gary, the men presume, had heard a Mayday call, grabbed the engine's medical bag, and raced over to see if he could help some injured men. He was found with the medical bag alongside the bodies of several firemen and civilians.

Among the bodies found with Gary's was that of Fred Ill, the captain of Ladder 2, located on East Fifty-first Street in Manhattan. A twenty-three-year veteran, Ill was a legendary fireman, famed within the department for leading the rescue of a man who had been pushed by a disturbed homeless person off a subway platform in front of an on-coming train in April 1999. The train had stopped, but Ill was not sure if the electric current had been shut off yet. Knowing that even the slightest wrong move could be fatal, Ill had crawled beneath the train, and, with very little clearance, carried the injured man out. Afterward Ill had made sure that the man, Edgar Rivera, whose legs had been amputated, was cared for properly, that he had a decent wheelchair, and that his apartment was modified to meet his new needs. Ill even arranged for a parochial school scholarship for Rivera's son. There was some speculation in the 40/35 house that Gary might have been tending to an injured Fred Ill, when they were both killed.