This story was written for an anthology about systemic racism in policing, and was not accepted because it’s not really about that. Thankfully, Todd Robins at Vautrin liked it, and was happy to publish it. It is my last published story. and it’s been at Vautrin a year, so I can share it with you. It’s about the rivalry between firemen and police officers, and I hope you like it.
Blue Canaries
by Thomas Pluck
“You're not always happy to see a cop, but you're always happy to see a fireman,” Grandy said in a moment of punchy clarity brought on by the desire for his customers to shut up and talk sports instead of their lifelong argument. Ford or Chevy. Giants or Jets. Yankees or Mets. Anything but this again.
Grandinetti’s Tavern didn’t cater to cops and firemen, but it was a working man’s gin mill in Newark opened by a retired boxer who sold one pound burgers for five bucks, so the red and the blue were bound to join the dock workers, cable guys, the gas and electric—anybody who still got a lunch hour thanks to their union—because Grandy’s burgers took time to cook, and were worth the wait.
Normally he stayed out of their disputes, but like most old Newark Italians, or anybody who stepped into a boxing ring, he didn’t do make a profession out of getting punched because he had better options. Grandy was touching eighty, and the cops had been mostly Irish when he was coming up. One rung up the immigration ladder and eager to kick the faces below, after absorbing kicks of their own. He became a boxer after a big Irish cop broke his hand on his skull. Grandy didn’t have any aptitude in school or the patience to work masonry like his old man, but he could take a punch.
And he’d taken too many. Grandy knew better than to take sides in this argument, but his particular form of dementia knew how to flummox his internal referee, like he had in the ring on his good days. So he’d been off in a daydream and let the boys get out of hand.
And boys they were. All men. Once in a while a lady cop showed up for a celebration—Grandy knew you didn’t call them that, but he still called women who drove trucks and taxis “lady drivers”—like boxing, this was a boy’s game.
Women had made headway, and Grandy thought maybe if there were more of them around, the boys might behave. Be that as it was, there wasn’t a gal in the joint the night that Horace Youmans said that the cops in his old precinct called firefighters “wellers,” after the deep-fried hot dogs at Rutt’s Hut. Horace was retired from the precinct but stayed in the game, his fade gray at the temples.
Kasey Halligan, the sun-spotted walrus ex-powerlifter of Fire House 51, retorted that firefighters around the nation called cops Blue Canaries.
It wasn’t being called a bird that set them off, it was finding out why.
They called them that because cops often charged into dangerous situations without waiting for the fire and Hazmat crews to show up.
They were the canaries in the coal mine.
“We know it’s toxic when there’s enough poison in the air to drop one of you. The brain’s already half-dead before you inhaled the chlorine or whatever’s leaking in there.”
There had been a lot of “oh!” and “ooh!” throughout the argument, like men running the dozens, but that brought cold silence.
Grandy didn’t see how calling them Blue Canaries was worse than calling the firefighters Wellers, but he knew some men were more sensitive than others. You won the fight in the ring, but the bout started long before. He always admired how Muhammad Ali got inside the heads of his opponents. Grandy couldn’t do it himself, but he learned to watch out for it. It was a sucker move, just as dumb as falling for Ali’s rope-a-dope.
Grandy thought he’d lighten things up by breaking in, but all it did was make things worse.
Horace said, “What do you mean, you’re not always happy to see a cop? You’re sure enough happy to see our money, Grandy.”
Grandy wiped down the bar with a clean rag to let it go.
But the chronic traumatic encephalitis, what they called having taken one two many shots to the head these days, had him in a young and ornery mood. Thinking on when he learned how thick his skull was.
“You guys do plenty of good, all due respect.” He took the battered night stick from under the bar, and tapped it on his clean-shaven skull. “I got this off one of your brothers. I was out walking, enjoying the air. None of us could afford cars back then. And the cops all walked a beat. This big Irishman they hired to keep us Guineas in line, he said he didn’t like my face. I said I didn’t like his either. He let me walk by before he threw the sucker punch.” Grandy smiled. “Big dummy broke his hand. I gave him a shovel hook to the gut and kept his night stick as a souvenir.”
The bar fell quiet. Grandy wasn’t known for stringing together more than a few sentences at a time, so when he did, they listened. He went back to the grill and tended the burgers.
He’d started something.
* * *
“I bet if some arch-criminal stuck a gun in his Grandy’s lumpy face, he’d be happy to see a cop.” Horace Youmans said, manning the six-burner Weber grill in his big yard out in South Orange. He held cookouts for the men he used to lead.
He’d put in his twenty in Newark and retired with a full pension, then started a new career as a security consultant for a suburban school district that paid more than he’d ever made on the beat. He liked showing the men how the years of walking the street protecting people who hated you could pay off, if you knew how to work the system.
“He needs to learn some respect for the uniform.” He flipped the burgers and squashed them flat with the spatula. You got well done and you liked it. He didn’t eat raw meat and the idea of it made him sick to his stomach.
“No one’s that stupid, everyone know’s it’s a blue bar.” A kid named Fichtner said, tipping a beer. He had five years at the Ironbound precinct, long enough to be smart, but still dumb enough to go along.
End of the month, the Newark PD were out filling their unspoken quotas, and the firefighters held court at Grandy’s. Kase Halligan strained a virgin mary through a mustache that could sweep a barroom floor if anyone was strong enough to hoist him by his short, powerlifter’s legs. There weren’t many who would try, even at the strongman competitions he used to compete in, and now judged.
He didn’t drink alcohol, a habit from training, but he had no problem treating his firehouse to burgers and beer after they went through Hazmat training, charging through a house full of burning tires, to test their gas masks and how well they could navigate through the black smoke.
You could never trust a fire. There was no such thing as a controlled burn. He hated that movie about the firebug fireman, made by the kid from Happy Days, because it showed a lot of dangerous stuff no trained firefighter would ever do, and scared his wife. No one with two brain cells who charged into a fire for a living would ever light one intentionally, because they knew you couldn’t control it like they did in the movie. Fire was a wild thing.
That’s part of what made the job what it was. It wasn’t a dick-measuring contest with the Blue Canaries. It was a difference of opinion.
The cops loved to say that they did whatever it took to come home alive. But the firefighters knew that such things were out of their jurisdiction. You had safety drills, protocols, checklists up the wazoo. You made plans, but fire was a force of nature, a creature of chaos.
But the best thing Halligan had ever heard from a priest was that man plans, and God laughs. He didn’t like saying it to the crew because a lot of them wore religious symbols under their gear. And he didn’t mean it as disrespect. He never went to church unless it was for a wedding or a funeral, but he sure as hell prayed when the flames had him boxed in. You prayed to the chaos.
And if you were lucky, the chaos went your way. A beam broke and opened a wall. The wind shifted and the fire-monster danced aside just long enough so you could run past without having the air in your lungs boil.
When the masked man came into Grandy’s and racked a sawed-off pump shotgun, Halligan prayed to the chaos that no one would die.
“Freeze motherfuckers! Put your wallets and phones on the bar!” Deep growling voice, jerky movements. “Gramps, empty the register before I blow a hole through your old ass.”
Halligan could wrap the shotgun around the big gunman’s head, but he slowly took out his wallet and set it on the bar. Die for what, a couple credit cards, a few hundreds, and a trip to the DMV to get a new license? He and his crew were at their end of the bar, and only two cops, Fichtner and Cruz, were at the blue end, working on a platter of fries. They didn’t reach for their wallets.
Halligan hoped they wouldn’t make a play. He didn’t buy into the hero mantle that his profession was given after 9/11. He’d lost brothers in the Towers, but that was the job. He did it because he had the ability, unlike most people, to run into a fire. As he liked to tell his kids, he couldn’t use a computer or swim worth a damn like they could. His ability didn’t make him any better than anybody.
Grandy was flipping burgers, taking his time. The patties started out as a pound of ground chuck and he cooked them slow on the griddle so the fat melted and kept it juicy. You didn’t ask him for a drink while he was at the grill, he was off in burgerland.
So when the gunman stomped in swearing and threatening, Grandy kept flipping burgers.
“You hear me, old man? Or are you fuckin’ deaf?”
The gunman rapped the shotgun on the bar and dented the mahogany.
That was what set Grandy off. He’d been robbed before, that’s why he kept the nightstick handy. You could always make more money, but he’d polished that bar for forty years. When a Grape Street Crip flashed a gun and demanded street tax, he ponied up. But back in the ‘90s when a junkie sank an ice pick in the bar and screamed for cash, he gave the pock-faced skeleton a slap so hard that he spun three times and crawled out the door.
The cops drew their weapons while the thief was distracted by his anger. “Drop it, asshole!”
The gunman froze, weapon aimed at the ceiling.
Grandy wanted the nightstick, but what he had was the spatula. He scooped grease off the griddle and flicked it at the shotgunner’s face. The balaclava didn’t protect like a good old-fashioned ski mask. The hot fat sizzled right through the material, and the gunman shrieked, stumbling back.
Clenching the trigger.
The cluster of buckshot punched through Grandy’s barrel chest and splattered the hot grill with the blood and meat it took out the other side.
Halligan stared. He’d watched people consumed by flames. Had discovered babies smothered by smoke and carried their lifeless bodies to their howling parents. But he’d never experienced such violence before.
Grandy’s expression didn’t even change. The pellets had shredded his heart and severed his spine. He collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, a thing that hammer hands to the temple had never been able to do to him in the ring.
Halligan wasn’t alone in his shock.
The two officers who had drawn their pistols were so stunned that they didn’t fire, and the robber ran out the door.
* * *
Grandy’s wake was well attended, at both showings. He was a minor Newark celebrity, having had some fame in the ring and no infamy outside of it. Halligan and his crew showed their respects. The police who frequented the bar did as well, coming in shifts. Homicide detectives interviewed those who’d been present, including Halligan, who despite his familiarity with trauma could remember little. The gunman’s masked face was a blur.
“Who would stick up a cop bar?” The gold shield said. “I know, Hal. It was your bar, too. But you usually don’t carry fireman’s axes into the joint. And he was alone. It makes no sense. Any new customers show up, order a beer, and leave? The register was pretty stuffed. You boys can drink.”
He thought about it. A few hipsters came to try the burger every once in a while, but it wasn’t a walk-in joint. You had some neighborhood regulars, and the old lady who sold bootleg DVDs out of a backpack.
Motorcycle police escorted the hearse to the cemetery. Halligan and his firehouse couldn’t spare a tanker or a ladder truck to make a parade of it, but they flashed their personal vehicles’ red emergency lamps in the procession. A councilwoman who didn’t know Grandy or drink in his bar said some words no one would remember, and the local access news sent a van, to have footage to put in that weekend’s rotation.
Trauma made Halligan quiet but observant. He was a rock at funerals, silently weathering the grief like a lighthouse in a storm. Giving an embrace or a vise grip handshake in place of platitudes. He saw a lot faces that day.
Grandy’s looked like he was asleep.
But Halligan didn’t see Horace Youmans.
Not every firefighter who’d tipped a glass at Grandy’s showed up, either. Halligan didn’t hold that against them. People had things to do. And some couldn’t handle the ritual. They paid their respects in other ways. The only funeral they’d show up to was their own.
But Youmans was what, a consultant? He wasn’t a beat cop who couldn’t swap shifts, or a firefighter who had to be ready to answer the call. He had always found time to drink at Grandy’s, and now because of a beef, he didn’t have time to show his face?
He had sent an arrangement, the biggest, from “the boys in blue.”
Things came up. Youmans had kids, didn’t he? Things always came up.
Fichtner was there, and Cruz. Fresh-faced and wet-eyed. They had cop bluster, but not the attitude. Not yet, at least. He lumbered their way and gave each a gentle pat on the shoulder with his slab of a hand.
That, evidently, was too much. Fichtner choked back words, slapped Hal on the back, and quick-walked to his car. Cruz shrugged and muttered a goodbye before he followed.
Halligan stayed until they lowered Grandy’s shiny black coffin into the ground.
But the absence stuck in Halligan’s craw. The big arrangement felt like a middle finger. But that was just Youmans being himself, if you asked anybody. A career asshole. The kind who if he didn’t have a badge, would be a gym rat like the guys Halligan often dealt with during his powerlifting days. The ones who had to get huge, because they couldn’t learn to shut their mouths.
It chewed at him.
Halligan called the school where Youmans worked, on the pretense that their alarm system had made a false alert. Could he stop in and check the alarm panel, make sure everything was all right?
Of course he could.
And is your security consultant in? Maybe he could talk him through checking it.
“No,” the office admin said. “It’s strange, he likes to walk the halls at least every other day. So they know they’re being watched, he says.” He could hear the eye-roll in her manner of speech.
Halligan thanked her and drove to the big house in South Orange, where he’d never been invited.
Not that he wanted to be. He felt bad for the young cops under their former superior’s spell. Worse for the ones who knew he was a jackass, but felt they had to pay tribute, lest it bite them in the ass later. He knew how that worked, and firehouses were far from immune. He didn’t subject his crews to it. The work was the work. If you did that well, it was enough. The guys who tried to cover for shoddy performance by being good company off hours, they didn’t last long.
Halligan rang the doorbell and the chimes echoed through the house. There was one car in the driveway, a Charger. Halligan found himself calculating the mortgage on a house in this tony suburb against cop salaries. It was attainable. But it made him wonder, were there any other professions that made you immediately try to figure out if the member was on the take?
A firefighter could take some grease now and then. A tip for getting a cat out of a tree, or the likes of it. But only the inspectors could chance a bribe. And Halligan turned them in when he found buildings out of code. It was life or death.
No one bribed a firefighter out of doing their job.
Youmans answered the door, his blistered face shiny with ointment. He looked at Halligan like he was the inevitable angel of death.
“Grill flared up,” he said.
Halligan shouldered the door like he would never do in a fire. He crushed Youmans against the wall. The old cop dug into his belt with his off hand. His suppurated nose met the anvil of Halligan’s freckled brow, and the lights went out.
Youmans woke up in his favorite seat at Grandy’s bar, bound with bungee cords.
Halligan did it alone. He wasn’t gonna drag young dumb fish into his mess. Not like Youmans had. He texted Cruz and Fichtner from Youmans’s own phone, after using his finger to unlock it.
And before he’d fired up the burners on the stove and poured a trail of high proof liquor down the mahogany bar and over sleeping beauty’s face, waking him out of his cracked-skull stupor.
“It was a mistake,” Youmans blabbered, as the fire ringed his chair. The photos from boxing matches on the walls curled in the flames. The famous burger meat had gone sour on the abandoned griddle, and the smoke barely masked it.
Halligan let him yammer. He wasn’t wearing his gear, but he knew what he could take. He cracked open the rear door to get a draft going, but with the windows and exhausts closed, it would be a long time before anyone called 911. The old brick building sat alone, a remnant of an older time, like Grandy himself had been.
He hated a fire, but sometimes you had to make a point.
Once the flames licked Youman’s pant legs and he started kicking and screaming, Halligan dropped the phone into the fire and walked out the back. Fichtner and Cruz might show up in time, they might not. They might even rush into a smoking building like a pair of blue canaries, to save Youmans or to watch him burn.
But like Grandy said, Youmans would most certainly be happier to see a firefighter burst into the bar’s front door than he would be to see a cop.
—
© 2022 Thomas Pluck, all rights reserved.
Nice work
I remember loving this in Vautrin and I still love it now.