Whirl Away

by Russell Wangersky

  003 would have been my rig anyway, if I wasn’t suspended and John, my regular partner, wasn’t home burning off overtime because he didn’t have anyone to roll with. We’re not that deep. There aren’t a bunch of call-ins with paramedic training sitting around waiting for me to get suspended, so when I got five days without pay, John got five with.

  It was summertime, so he and Kate had probably spent the day at home filling the kiddie pool with water for the youngster or something. And now, with no duty in sight, he was probably kicked back with a beer. John talked about his family so much, I felt like I knew them. Kate didn’t like the hours, the rotating shifts, the job itself; John didn’t like the complaining. They were made for each other. I wondered which would end first, the job or the marriage. I was betting on the marriage, but then again, I’m not impartial. It’s hard to find a partner you click with.

  I had to come into the ready room late enough to avoid running into anyone I knew. When I was out the door and the automatic door opener was closing it behind me, my ambulance was an invisible rig.

  Driving, I heard the dispatcher, still trying to find a crew. She sounded patient, but also a little frayed. It sounded like Anna, the new, pretty one with the small, careful mouth and straight blond hair. We’d gone on exactly one date, she and I, and from then on she was busy every single time I called her to ask for a repeat.

  She was still looking for a rig. Berwick was out somewhere and they couldn’t roll—and it was too damned far anyway.

  Might as well send an ambulance from Mars.

  I reached behind the gearshift and flicked the lights and siren on when the dispatcher finally found an ambulance in Waterville, because she gave the crew the address and I picked it right out of the air—“Code Four Medical, 1027 White Mountain Road”—and I’d be in there and gone before they even got off the highway.

  I put the pedal down and ran straight up the hill, up past Prospect Street and the new row of subdivision houses, up towards the hilltop park and a wide, shaky turn to the left on loose gravel.

  If it had been daytime, I can tell you that you’d have to agree it was beautiful country: big patches of open ground, fenced for livestock or blocked with crops, and it just gives you the feeling that the soil’s so rich you could grow anything at all, even shoes or fridges if you had the right kind of seeds. But if you were riding with me, you probably would have been more taken with the big rectangular wing mirror, watching the rooster tail of dust fling up into the sky behind us. Or else, like John, you’d be watching the road in front, hoping like hell a cow or a deer didn’t stroll onto the road, holding on to the dashboard for dear life the way he does almost every time.

  I like to drive fast, and I’m good. I got to White Mountain faster than any other driver would have.

  When you see a house with the front door wide open, it often tells you that you’ve found the right place.

  I slung the ambulance around and put it right up next to the house, reversing up the driveway and nipping in across the grass because it would make it easier for me to load the victim if I couldn’t get any help. Put the back doors almost to the steps, feeling the heavy ambulance settling down into the grass and soil.

  Inside, it was absolute pandemonium.

  I had hardly gotten in through the door when a guy grabbed me by the shirt and hauled me the rest of the way through, yelling, “What the fuck took you so long?” and I could feel spit spattering across my face in a fine spray. I had the trauma kit, and I sort of shrugged by the guy, pulling back away from him while moving forwards against the side of the hall. Angles are important for emergency work, like they are for a boxer. You give them an edge of you, like a bullfighter feinting, so they don’t get a good grip and you can get by, like you were greased or something, because they get revved up and they’re hanging on to you, not seeing how they’re getting in the way.

  There was a couple next to the sofa, and the television was on, and God help me, there was popcorn all over the place, all over the floor and the sofa and the chairs, like Orville Redenbacher had fucking exploded and the guy on the ground had been caught in the crossfire somehow.

  He had it all going on. He was coding, his heart stopped, and I was cutting his shirt off and yelling “What’s his name, what’s his name?” because sometimes, if nothing else, that shuts everyone up.

  The woman rocked back on her heels away from him, that kind of “I-can’t-watch-but-I-have-to” thing, before saying, “It’s Bill. It’s my husband. His name is Bill.”

  Big bare-bellied Bill, pleased to meet you, I thought, and I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever get a call where someone having a heart attack wasn’t just plain huge. They say people are getting bigger, bad diet and a lack of exercise, and I believe it. Often, we end up calling for another crew if we have time, because we don’t want to end up injured too. Load some dying monster on a backboard and tear up your own back trying to lift him? No thanks. People make their own beds; sometimes they die in them.

  This looked like the rush didn’t matter. Bill was bluish on the sides of his face, lips like blackberry juice, and I figured I’d be going through the motions, more for everyone else’s benefit than his. And fuck me if I didn’t stick the HeartStart defibrillator patches on his big naked chest and give him one quick jolt, and damned if the thing didn’t actually start him right back up again.

  What a moment that is. I’m not religious, not a bit, but I swear, it’s just like having God right there in the room when they go from nothing to a heartbeat. It’s not something you get to see very often: zap a slab of already-dead meat and then see it open its eyes and blink at you, like it was a guy asleep in bed and you’d woken him up with a whopping great electric alarm clock or something. Especially when it’s been forever since you hit the road in the first place, and by all rights he should be stone cold dead by now. The only thing I could think was that he’d collapsed, but his heart must have kept ticking until just before I got there. Because sure as anything, that heart was stopped; it doesn’t matter how big you are, if you’ve got a pulse, I’ll find it.

  That changed everything. Now, instead of transporting what I was sure was going to be a body, I had to get Bill to the hospital. And quick.

  I yelled at the guy who’d grabbed me coming in, got him to go out and wrestle the stretcher out of the ambulance, and we rolled Bill up on one side and down onto it and cinched the straps down.

  “Aren’t there supposed to be two of you?” the man asked after we got Bill into the back of the rig. I deliberately ignored the question.

  “Tell his wife I’ll meet you guys there, Eastern Kings Memorial,” I said, because Bill needed to be stabilized at the closest hospital before anything else, and I slammed the double doors on him, my last look inside the ambulance seeing Bill’s big tented feet under the sheets.

  I ripped the rig out and down the driveway, cutting the wheels hard and feeling the back tires tearing up the grass. I put the siren back on again, and the lights.

  Then I got the shock of my life from the back of the rig. Because Bill was talking to me. Honest.

  For at least a mile, Bill was talking to me. I turned the siren off then, still driving fast. He told me that he’d been watching hockey and that someone had scored—he couldn’t even remember which team was playing—and the next thing he knew, he was out on the floor. He was getting it out in short sentences, breathless, a few words at a time, as if he was feeling the shape of each individual one of them in his mouth, like hard candies.

  Then I was walking through all the heart attack symptoms with him—crushing pain in the arm, shortness of breath—and he had them all. But he was lucky: he had been stopped and then started again. On any medications? “Insulin diabetic.” Any allergies? “Cats—but I hate ’em anyway.”

  I swear, once in the conversation he even laughed, telling me he had heard his wife scolding him while he was lying there, that she was sitting there yelling at him for dying. I remember thinking right then, th
e ambulance roaring bright through the night, that this might actually work, that I might get him there in time. I remember also, at virtually the same instant, thinking, “Don’t even think it,” because you might not believe this, but in EMS we’re the most superstitious people alive. When we walk back to the station with a coffee, we’ll hop, skip and jump to miss every crack in the pavement. We’ll stop to pick up lucky pennies. We’ll count crows, “One for sorrow, two for joy,” and if we see just one crow, we’ll stop dead until we’re sure we can find another, even if we have to pretend that a green garbage bag caught in a tree is really a bird.

  There’s enough working against you already. All you need is to jinx it, all you need is to make it a little bit worse. You take every single bit of luck you can get, and still lots of people die before you even get close to the hospital.

  Then, from the back of the rig, I heard a short, hacking breath.

  “Thanks, bud.”

  It was breathy and thin, and it was the last thing Bill said.

  Then I heard a grunting sigh that sounded like it was rattling right up from his stomach, a big sort of gurgled breath, and I knew it was bad. I knew that sound, and if I had been working with John, I know what kind of glance would have gone between the two of us. It’s a bad sound.

  “Bill?” I called towards the back of the ambulance, my eyes still on the road, the lights cycling off the trees in bright red and white splashes as we flicked by. “Bill?”

  Nothing.

  And if they’ve coded, if their heart has really stopped again, you’ve realistically got four minutes on the road before their brain starts to burn out. Every cell in their body crying out for oxygen, and not finding it, because the blood’s not trucking it around anymore.

  I did the math. I couldn’t stop to check, not by myself, because it would take too much time, even if I managed to shock him again and get everything going. Bill had been gone once already, and the odds just weren’t in my favour.

  So I started screaming.

  I was screaming “Talk to me!” through the walkway back to Bill, and I was screaming down the road from White Rock too, my foot right to the floor, the ambulance shaking wildly on the dirt road, and I could hear that everything in the back was coming apart.

  I knew exactly where I was—up over the top of the ridge now and heading down the hill towards Wolfville—and I thought hard and decided that I might be able to make it. Four minutes, and if I drove fast enough, if I didn’t get stopped anywhere, I really could be there in under three. I had the siren back on again by then, and the engine in the TopKick was going flat out.

  Everything in the back of the ambulance is held behind Plexiglas sliding doors—blood pressure cuffs, pressure dressings, IV bags full of sterile saline—and the faster I went, and the more potholes I hit, the more things were raining down on silent Bill in the back. It would be like a ticker-tape parade of medical gear back there by the time I got to the hospital, but if I got there in time, who would care?

  The rig felt like it was in the midst of shaking apart, like the wheels were going to fly off or I was going to break an axle or something. There are rules for how fast we’re allowed to go. You might not believe it when you see an ambulance ripping up behind you in the rear-view mirror, leaning out to change lanes and moving so fast that it tilts, so fast that, in your car, you can feel your body cringing, waiting for the speeding rig to clip the side of your car, but there are rules about how you drive. I’d pretty much broken all the rules anyway, so I had 003 wide open, the engine roaring in under the hood, not another vehicle in sight out in front of me.

  I was calling over my shoulder again to Bill when I piled hard into a big pothole I didn’t see in time, and the whole front end of the TopKick sagged. It sagged, leaned to the right, and then the headlights didn’t even line up properly anymore. The steering wheel didn’t seem to be attached to the wheels. And I saw thistles, a crisp, even green line of them, just for a moment. Thistles, like a line of exclamation points, the punctuation at the end of a sentence, a run, a career.

  They told me Bill was dead before we crashed.

  “All of the injuries on his body were post-mortem.” That’s what the final report said, and that’s coroner talk to take home with you to rub on your conscience like ointment, because it’s supposed to mean, “You didn’t kill him.”

  The stripe of the strap cuts below his shoulders, even the gash over his eyebrow where the monitor unit had come off its brackets and hit him, the crushed bone where his ankles had been—none of them had bled at all, not even a little seepage, meaning his heart had completely, absolutely stopped before we crashed.

  The ambulance went straight down into a ditch, the front right tire blown out, with me high up over the steering wheel so that I cracked four ribs and smacked my temple when we hit the embankment on the other side. And the whole TopKick must have almost stood right up on its nose then, everything inside flying apart, before landing on its roof and crushing the light bar.

  The ambulance from Waterville found us, rattling their way back down the hill from a house where they’d been told an ambulance had already left, and they had no idea who it might have been. They found us because the headlights stayed on, and they said I was still unconscious when they got there. It’s a wonder I remember any of it.

  My partner John came to the hospital—Kate waiting with the kid in the car—and he was still on days with pay, a free vacation. He told me that the ambulance had held together all right, that even completely upside down the clamps hadn’t let go of the gurney wheels, and Bill had been hanging from the ceiling like a stranded parachutist when they had forced their way into the back, the back doors crushed up and into his legs.

  John looked at his hands when he talked. “You’re in shit this time, Tim,” he said. “You’re surely in shit this time.”

  He kept looking at his hands, scratching at the rough patches, pulling off a fragment of fingernail. “Any one of us, we would have done the same thing,” he said, but the words sounded wrong, as if he was suggesting they wouldn’t have done quite the same thing, really.

  No one from any of the other crews came in to see me. The union sent me a fruit basket, but I didn’t even take the Cellophane off it.

  I might as well have been infectious.

  So, do they fire me because I was out on the call alone, because I didn’t wait for a duty crew to finally make their way up there? Or will it be because I wrecked an ambulance with a patient strapped into the back? The insurance company was certainly going to raise hell, because I was suspended and driving an out-of-service rig. Just about the only people who weren’t mad at me were Bill’s family. They even sent a card.

  I’m going to get canned now, I remember thinking, just because I couldn’t help but do my job. You’d think I’d be the kind of guy they’d be desperate to keep. I’ve had three sick days in five years, I’ve taken every scrap of overtime they’ve ever asked me to take, and I’ve got a whole year’s vacation banked because there didn’t seem to be any point in taking it.

  When Bill’s wife came in to visit me, I didn’t recognize her. She had to tell me who she was. Away from that house, away from the scene, she didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met before.

  “You did your best,” she said. “Sometimes that’s all you can do.”

  I shook my head, told her I was sorry. But I didn’t tell her that it was our fault, that we should have had more rigs on the road. That maybe her husband wouldn’t have died.

  She stayed by my bed for a while, while I thought about what I hadn’t said, and what it all meant.

  And I’d be stupid if I didn’t know what was coming next.

  Riley’s expecting to give me a lecture and a chance to get out clean, a chance for me to quit and save him a raft of problems. Riley’s waiting to tell me that I rode a full wagon into the ditch and someone died as a result. Riley’s a vicious bastard; he might lean in real close and whisper, “I’ve got you this time, fucker,”
when my union rep’s picked up my file and turned away towards the door.

  But I don’t think so. Because Bill’s wife is sitting by my bed, and I know exactly what I can tell her, and exactly what the ambulance system doesn’t want her to know.

  Lying there, I had a message for our precious administrator.

  I want my goddamn rig back. I’ll trade him the vacation and the sick days if he wants, offer them up to burn off a suspension if he wants.

  But I want my rig and my partner and my goddamn job.

  And he’s going to give it to me, too.

  Because if he tries to hang me out to dry, I’ll hang him too.

  Not enough rigs on the road. Not enough of us to work in the shit and the blood and the rest of it, the siren rippling past the thistles and through the black night, the rig all lit up and heading for another bad surprise.

  If I have to tear the whole place down around me, damn it, they’re going to have to put me back out there.

  FAMILY LAW

  H ENNEBURY versus Hennebury was up on my computer screen. It was Nova Scotia case law, and I wasn’t really sure it would apply here, but I read it anyway, trying to see if there was anything worth keeping, even hidden between the lines. I wanted to collect all the pieces, to try to see if there was any way they might fit into the case I was working on, to see if they had a slightly different take. Looking for something I could toss up in front of the judge, as much to confuse as anything else. Give them more detail to chew over. More for them to think about.

  Applicant and respondent were married for twenty-three years, two children, one of the kids already in college. The judge calls them the husband and the wife all the way through the decision, even though it’s basically the last official time that anyone will ever call them that.

  Hennebury is fighting with Hennebury over pensions, the pair of them having finally settled the child and spousal support in mediation, but the whole case is now breaking on the shoals that he has registered retirement savings plans and that, while she does too, hers are considerably smaller.