Ambulance Girl

by Jane Stern

  I walk over to her. I touch my hand to her shoulder blade, which juts starkly through her nightgown. “ ’Bye, Melba,” I say. I have taken off my mask, so she can hear me better. She fixes her eyes on me but doesn’t say anything.

  “Take care of yourself,” I say, knowing she is unable to care for herself.

  She takes one long last look at me and turns her face to the wall to wait for the next ambulance and the next ride.

  By the time I climb back in the ambulance, the driver has folded all the clean blankets and sheets, rolled up the blood pressure cuff and stethoscope. It is like a fresh hotel room. There is no trace of Melba anymore.

  “Let’s go,” I say, and we take off for home. I feel like crying but my eyes remain dry, like Melba’s. “Hobbies: sewing and gospel music,” I repeat to myself, and turn out the overhead lights on the ceiling of the ambulance as we glide through the night toward home in darkness on a trip where someone will be happily waiting for me at the other end. I am very fortunate.

  11

  I am an only child and a writer by trade, both lonely situations. After my mother divorced my father, I grew up as a latchkey kid, came home from school to an empty apartment, watched TV, read, goofed around in my own fantasyland. Sometimes I made phony phone calls to strangers just to hear another voice. As an adult, life is not that different. As a writer I work at home, I don’t have children. I can stay home for days in my bathrobe and no one will say anything. Even when I am not depressed it is seductive to do this. I am used to myself as my best company. I have never had to deal closely with other people on a day-to-day basis until I became an EMT. Now I have to deal with a firehouse full of people.

  I always wanted to be from a big family, although I had no idea what that really meant. I pictured everyone sitting happily together at mealtimes, idyllically exchanging Christmas presents beneath a tinsel-laden tree. Now I have thirty-five brothers and sisters—my fellow EMTs and firemen—and I am, at last, in a family of sorts.

  The first thing I begin to realize about families in real life, as opposed to my TV sitcom–fueled fantasies, is that they fight with each other constantly about everything. My new firehouse family is dysfunctional, or maybe it is typical; I wouldn’t be a good judge. I always dreamed about having seven brothers, and now I have many times that number. Their favorite things to do are smoke and drink, eat pizza and curse, and, of course, put out fires.

  I still sense that to be a woman at the Georgetown Volunteer Fire Department is to be an interloper, and I try to make myself as near invisible as possible. Dot, who joined the department at the same time I did, feels no such compunction.

  Once a month we have monthly business meetings, which I adore. I love the ritual of sitting on metal folding chairs in a big room full of macho men, most of whom smoke. We stand and salute the flag, say the Pledge of Allegiance, listen to the reading of the minutes of the last meeting, and for the next two hours, we argue with one another, name-call, are generally rotten, and at the end, when the meeting is concluded, go to the big room and drink sodas and eat candy.

  What I begin to realize as I go on more calls and attend more meetings is that in a firehouse family, it is fair to say that although everyone spends a lot of time bitching and gossiping about everyone else, the truth is that most everyone would walk into a burning building to help their fellow members. Our lives depend on each other. At a fire, an accident, or a crime scene, you better know who has your back covered. This doesn’t mean that cliques don’t form and that people don’t gossip, and at times it feels like saying hello to someone is setting a match to a keg of dynamite.

  I am on my best behavior at business meetings; I want to do nothing to upset the status quo. I sit in awe of people like Eddie, an eighty-five-year-old “life member” of the department who comes to every monthly meeting in his Georgetown fire department baseball cap and smokes a huge cigar through the whole proceedings. I pointed him out to Michael once when I saw him in town and Michael said he was a dead ringer for the movie director John Ford.

  We are all sitting in the meeting room when Dot raises her hand. I know trouble is coming. I know she is going to propose a change in the way things are done. The chief calls on her from the table where he and the president and the firehouse secretary sit, at the front of the room near the American flag.

  Dot begins a lecture about secondhand smoke and how Eddie and the rest of the guys are putting her health at risk, how she is getting asthmatic at meetings, how her hair and clothing stink at the end of the evening.

  I feel my toes curl in my shoes. How could she have the nerve, the gall, to demand that the guys give up smoking? What will happen to Eddie? There is a deathly silence. I am afraid for her, and for me, because I don’t want anything to change at this firehouse. I don’t want it modernized or “improved.” It is, to me, perfect the way it is.

  I am expecting World War III, but it doesn’t materialize. You can’t fight political correctness these days, and as the guys stub out their cigarette butts and Eddie chews on the rope of his now unlit cigar, the vote passes to ban smoking at the firehouse. Eddie never comes to another meeting.

  I began to see that there is a definite pecking order to life in Georgetown, and it is similar to small towns everywhere that have been discovered by yuppies and commuters from the big city.

  In the four towns whose butt ends converge in Georgetown there are now many wealthy people living in the big new McMansions that sell for a million dollars and more. We have a handful of famous people, one well-known political pundit, a rock star, a famous writer, some big-name artists, and plenty of people who drive through shabby Georgetown in their Porsches and BMWs to towns with fancier zip codes.

  What they don’t know is that the true power brokers of the town regard them as arrivistes and nobodies. The town is run by people who have grown up here, and in many cases have forebears who were townies as far back at the 1700s.

  These people do not live in the million-dollar homes or drive sports cars. Instead they pump gas at the local station, work in the grocery store, deliver oil to houses, or are plumbers and handymen and garbage truck drivers. They know everything about the town, they know where the skeletons are buried. The rich newcomers think they own the town but it is just an illusion. If you need anything done, if you need a deed to your property, or your septic tank cleaned, or an ambulance or fire rescue, you are dealing with the real owners of Georgetown.

  Our fire chief and his three brothers are among the true elite. The Heibeck brothers occupy the highest positions in the firehouse. When they aren’t doing firehouse duties they are pumping gas and fixing cars at the service station they own, a quarter mile away from the firehouse. They are men of few words. In fact, for the first year I serve at the firehouse our conversation never goes beyond “Hello” . . . and even that is a stretch. Usually, all I get is a nod of the head.

  Michael comes home one day after having coffee with a local who knows the Heibeck brothers. He tells me this man said the Heibeck brothers like me. I am on a cloud of joy all day. I am getting in with the in crowd; I am on my way to getting “made” if I have their approval.

  I remember all the years I lived in town and pulled in for gas at the Heibeck brothers’ service station. Back in the 1980s, swelled with the easy money of the decade, Michael and I bought a big black Mercedes-Benz. We were among the town’s new strivers, we thought the town’s importance was reflected in the stockbrokers and the celebrities and the corporate types who commuted into the city. I never paid much attention to the Heibeck brothers; they were just four townies wearing mechanics’ jumpsuits. They took my Visa card and swiped it when I had a full tank. We brought in our Mercedes to have the oil changed. Michael and I thought they were impressed by us.

  Now when I stop at the service station my eyes are cast downward with humility. I am not humble because the Mercedes is long gone and replaced by a Subaru. I am humble because Mike Heibeck is the fire chief and I now call him Chief instead
of Mike when I hand him my credit card.

  I genuinely like all the Heibeck brothers. On the 1 to 10 scale of gregarious they range from a 1 to maybe a 3, but they are the best kind of good old boys: delightfully old-school when a lady is present, no cursing, no coarse behavior.

  I also love thinking about how deep their knowledge of the town is.

  I am called out for a 911 call to a house down the road from me. It is a conspicuously expensive house recently occupied by a Boston couple who wanted to go rural in Connecticut. The husband of the couple, who can’t be more than thirty-five, is slumped over in the bathroom, apparently from a heart attack.

  The ambulance races to the scene, and I see the chief is there as well. The house is newly decorated and elaborately furnished. It bears the professional mark of a good interior designer.

  “I don’t know what is wrong with my husband,” the wife cries. “He just collapsed. I think he is dying.” I am not so sure he is dying but he looks sick enough to me; gray-faced and semiconscious.

  “It smells very fumy in here, maybe it is the new floors or fresh paint,” one of the EMTs says. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong.”

  We load the husband on the stretcher and wheel him out to the waiting ambulance. He is getting oxygen but lies as limp as a flounder on the cot. The chief and I exchange glances. I know exactly what he is thinking. We don’t have to say a word to one another. We both know this house is cursed. Fifteen years ago there was a spectacularly gruesome murder here; the couple who lived in the house were killed by their grown son who had been institutionalized for most all his adult life. After the son killed them he chewed on them like a cannibal until he decided that he’d better leave and drove himself to Vermont, where he was soon found and brought back to stand trial in Connecticut. Since this horrible event the house has gone through many new owners, leaving behind a string of divorces, abandonments, and bankruptcies. I wonder if the new owners or the previous ones have any idea that they are sleeping in a house that comes straight out of Stephen King. It is not something most people would think to ask about when house hunting.

  But even if they don’t know, I know, and of course the chief knows, and we each know the other knows, and we will not tell the new people what we know. It is a town secret, the kind of thing only the true elite are privy to.

  12

  Every Monday night at the firehouse we have a drill. Keeping our skills fresh is a big part of being an EMT or a fireman.

  The gruff man who first let me look around the ambulance has been with the fire department for forty-five years. His name is Charlie Pfhal, and he has turned out to be an amazement and an inspiration to me. He is a tough old bird, speaks his mind, will nail a liar or a bull-shit artist within ten seconds. And although he is edging his way toward eighty, he still drives the ambulance and runs the EMT side of the firehouse.

  He and Bernice are the driving force for the EMTs at Georgetown and they are always trying to get the name of the firehouse changed from Georgetown Fire Company to Georgetown Fire and EMS. The firemen hate this idea, they feel it disrupts the unity of the firehouse for EMTs to be separated out, and this ongoing simmering feud periodically erupts into fights, harsh words, and stubborn behavior.

  You can see the tension at the Monday-night drills. The EMTs want to practice EMT things, like using the suction unit in the rig, finessing the defibrillator, wrapping wounds, and splinting fractures. The firemen want to play with their hoses, and they want us EMTs to join in the fun.

  I have never seen a fire truck that doesn’t gleam, and while Georgetown may have an old ambulance, its fire trucks are polished to military precision. The pride of the outfit, Tower 8, is a half-million-dollar aerial tower truck that looks like a new toy just taken out of its box.

  I had no idea how labor-intensive fire equipment upkeep is. Not just the trucks get scrubbed and buffed, but every hose, every rescue rope, every ladder is gone over until it is in perfect condition and rolled, folded, or mounted exactly right on the truck.

  The firemen want the EMTs to drill with them. To roll hoses and do rescues. Sometimes we EMTs do this, other times we sneak off on Monday night and do ambulance things and come back to the “barn,” as the firehouse is called, to find a tangle of angry, sulky firemen rolling their hoses and looking abandoned and mad. “I will not roll hose,” Bernice says. “They don’t clean the ambulance or fold blankets for us, so forget about it.”

  My secret is that I actually like drilling with the firemen. Although I want to stay on Bernice’s good side and can grumble right along with her, there is something terrific about watching the fire side work out. I have held the turgid hoses while the water blasts through it, steadied the magnum pressure against my hip. It is a heady feeling, as is going up in the basket atop the aerial truck seventy feet in the air.

  I also like drilling with the firemen because it has been my observation that there is no such thing as an ugly fireman. It is amazing how even the plainest sap transforms into hunkhood the minute those outfits go on. Slack-jawed guys whom I have seen watching fishing shows or NASCAR on the big TV in the main room, or gobbling down the favorite Georgetown snack of a dozen hard-boiled eggs, look like demigods when they are wearing their bunker gear and hats.

  The drill everyone dreads the most is ice water rescue. Exactly when it is scheduled for each year is kept a secret because it is generally assumed that if it were announced that a particular night was ice water rescue, no EMTs would show up. So what always happens is that we EMTs arrive wearing street clothes and are pathetically underdressed, while the fire guys in their bulky weatherproof suits are comfortable standing outside in the freezing night air. And thus continues the cycle of why EMTs hate cold water rescue drill, because we are freezing and uncomfortable.

  Ice water rescue is always done in the middle of January or February when the lake behind Georgetown’s defunct wire mill freezes over. The fire trucks and the ambulance are driven the half mile to the site (known as Toxic Pond to the fire guys), where we walk to the water’s edge and wait for the action to begin.

  I have a sneaking suspicion that a certain Monday night is going to be the drill, probably because the officers are all so vague about what will be happening that evening. I dress warmly—hat, gloves, down jacket—but it isn’t enough outerwear and I am still freezing. The walk from the road to the pond’s edge is a steep slope, covered with ice and snow. I am terrified that I am going to slip, slide, and fall into the lake.

  Bernice literally shows me how to walk. This is Bernice’s greatest gift, she is a fount of practical wisdom, something my parents were sorely lacking in. I may be exaggerating, but I can’t think of a single practical thing I learned growing up except once when our housekeeper, who grew up in a shack in Alabama, told me all hangers in a closet should be in the same direction so if there was a fire you could reach in and grab your clothes in a big armful and run.

  Now I am getting walking lessons. “Walk with your feet sideways and lean uphill,” Bernice tells me. “Like you’re skiing,” she adds—making me feel like a total nerd because in my entire life I have never skied. Bernice, her husband, and her two handsome sons are all jocks.

  “I don’t know how to ski,” I whimper as I clutch her, trying not to fall. She explains to me the logic that if your feet are pointed straight ahead that is where you will slide; if your feet are angled away from the slope, you stay put. It is amazing; I inch down the slope and I am not slipping. I can walk on ice; I feel like I am walking on water.

  “Be careful at the edge,” Bernice tells me. She remembers the first ice water rescue drill we were on together. I fell through the ice at the lip of the pond, crashing up to my thighs in the icy water. I was embarrassed and had to retreat to the ambulance, strip off my pants, and wrap blankets around me. This year I refuse to go near the edge of the water. I hover back. There is only a sliver of moon and it is hard to see what the firemen are doing way out in the middle of Toxic Pond. Soon my eyes grow accustomed
to the night, and the ice on the bright pond silhouettes a fireman in a red diving suit. The other firemen have walked out onto the frozen pond and with axes are chopping a hole into which the red man will submerge himself. We are to rescue the red man by throwing rescue ropes to him and hauling him out of the water.

  The panic and excitement of ice rescue makes me giddy. I am not alone. The firemen act goofy and frolic; one lies on the ice and acts like a seal, flapping his arms and legs and barking, while another group sings the theme song to the TV show Flipper.

  Months before, we had the fire trucks removed from the bays and we were given the rescue ropes to practice throwing. The shortest one is fifty feet long, and all the ropes come coiled in a yellow or blue canvas bag. The bag has a handle that you grab onto to throw, and you hold a loop of rope that comes out the end of the bag in your hand, so when you make your throw you are still connected with the rope and can haul the person in.

  Throwing a bag with a long rope in it seems easy. It isn’t. In fact, even the male EMTs and Bernice, who is athletic and coordinated, are challenged by flinging this rope to the drowning victim. Since I will not go to the edge of the water, I have added at least an extra ten feet to my throwing distance. I stand on a slippery slope, wishing I had worn boots with cleats, and swing the rescue bag in the air to get the feel of it. “What’s the big deal?” I tell myself as I swing the rescue bag back and forth.

  I am given the go sign by the firemen in charge of the drill. I wind up like Catfish Hunter on the pitcher’s mound and let go of the bag when I feel the surge of momentum building. I slide on the ice and fall on my ass; the bag flies in the air and comes down hard on the head of the assistant chief, who is standing in front of me. He is one of the Heibeck brothers, the one who hardly speaks at all. He glowers at me and says nothing, which speaks volumes. I struggle to my feet. Another of the firemen who is a training officer and who likes me comes to my aid. “If this was a real situation, Jane, you could stay in the ambulance warming it up, getting it ready for transport.”