The man waited on the sun-kissed concrete, before the sandstone wall, below a powder blue, summer sky. He waited for a bus, wondering if it’s driver would see him, with the Sysco truck unloading in front of the curbside, concrete slab where the buses kneeled for boarders. A white SUV with a young cinnamon girl at the wheel, blaring a throaty love song from an earlier time, idled at the light, followed by a cab from which shrill music from the turbaned driver’s homeland rattled, around which a rumbling Crown Victoria banked, running the red light, as the slouching t-shirted thug behind the wheel chanted in time with the savage beat of his nihilistic anthem.

Up rumbled a fire engine, a pumper, cutting ahead of the Sysco truck, pulling beyond the corner. A giant black, 70-pounds overweight and the color of coal, stepped out of the passenger seat and directed the youthful mսlatto in parking the hissing engine, showing little impatience for the well-groomed and slight fellow he supervised.

Two more firemen piled out of the engine and swaggered around to the sidewalk, regarding the observer with disdain as they erased his chance of catching the bus he had been waiting for, using the concrete boarding pad* as their parking pad. Their glares of hostile disdain betokened an urgent mission, some grave undertaking that might save a life, rescue a child, or put out a fire. But there is only one wisp of smoke rising in the near distance. Onward the pageantry preceded as the giant black directed the parking and scolded the driver—obviously a new recruit, relegated to guarding the vehicle and lacking the necessary skills to save whatever structure or person needed saved.

The two glaring firemen, one a mսlatto the other a quadroon, hefted their heavy belts and patted their expansive bellies, dwarfed in height by the towering black, though not in girth. Their shaven heads shining under the sun, they hitched up their belts again, looking to their leader, and on the cue of his dismissive nod that Engine 56 would never be suitably parked in this no-parking zone by the raw recruit behind the wheel, he waved them along.

With the towering black leading, striding along behind an austere grimace, the two stout firemen winged out their arms wide in a “make way” posture and slunk behind him, like ghouls to a graveyard, towards the ominously rising smoke, which wafted up from the little, yellow-brick building at the lower end of the sandstone wall, a building painted with the mythic image of The Big Bad Wolf, declaring that pork is on the menu.

It was lunchtime for Engine 56, and the paleface in their wake had to weigh the odds that a bus driver would stop for one of his kind and permit him to board outside of a boarding zone. Hefting his backpack with a grumbled, “Fat fucks,” he made his way up to the next stop, past an office building recently burned down and tagged with graffiti by the latest gang to lay claim to this neighborhood, confident that the firemen of this Once Great Medieval City were up to the task of preserving its ruination.

*At bus stops where concrete pads have not been installed [at a length equal to 1.5 to two buses] the asphalt is pushed up into 10-inch high ridges from the action of the bus banking over to the curb.