by Ryan Gattis
Ernesto’s, though, it was different. It was personal. He didn’t even recognize me when I was there trying to help him, but even beat-up as he was, I recognized him. I knew we went to Lynwood High together, that we even hung out a little freshman year and he was kind. We kissed some in the band room, but it never became anything. He never knew it because I never told him, but he was the first boy I ever did that with.
Years later, I saw him sometimes at the Tacos Al Unico truck or the stand on Atlantic and Rosecrans, and he’d always give my abuela one more taco than we ordered, extra onion because that’s how my grandma liked it and he always remembered. That was Ernesto, I guess. He remembered the small things. A while later I heard from my cousin Termite that Ernesto had to pay for those extra tacos out of his wages. He never said anything to us about that. He never complained. I guess that was Ernesto too.
Then I come home one night and Ernesto’s lying flat in my alley and all this nursing school I had can’t save him. He gives up right under my fingers, and then he stays there all night, into the next day. He stays there blocking the way I normally go to work, and insects and birds were getting too interested in him, so I called 911 five times and only got through once, but then got put on hold and they never picked back up. So then I called my aunt’s boyfriend that works at the county coroner’s and he said he was sympathetic and all, but no way was he coming down, not with how dangerous things were, and besides, he said, he had zero resources. His guys were spread out all over the city, already hours behind on pickups, even in safe areas.
That set me off. I was screaming before I knew it, asking him how he thought it made me feel having to live in the middle of it, having to have the dead body of the first boy I ever kissed outside my garage for more than a day? Did he know that I’ve had the windows closed in my house this whole time but now I’m starting to smell it, and did he have any idea how awful that was when you can’t get away?
After that, I didn’t wait for him to say anything, I hung up and called a private ambulance company I know of through the hospital and I begged them to come, but it wasn’t until I told them I’d pay the drivers extra that they started listening. I had to lie, too. I told them I was his sister and, please, we just needed him treated right. The guy on the phone I didn’t know, but he said he knew of a place to take the body, and then he started building a lie of his own, saying how he’d have to tell the cops there was no crime scene, that it was a body dump, and they were just out doing a run and stumbled across it and the family begged us, and, Ah, I don’t know, I remember him saying, I’ll think of something. Just make it cash.
I watched two guys take Ernesto up and put him in the back for $228. That’s eleven 20s, a 5, and three 1s. All the banks have been closed since the riots started, so I could only give what I had in the house, every last little thing I’d saved for rainy days. I was going to buy a new TV with that money, but now that seems stupid. I don’t even want to look at everything going on in the city anymore. I don’t want to see the news. I just want quiet.
The thing that sticks with me about how they took him is that they didn’t remove his sister’s flannel from his face, the black-and-white one I watched her put on him specially. They just put a white sheet over everything, from head to toe, and tried not to disturb anything about the body. On the chance it had evidence on it, they said. After that, I watched them close the doors up, and I watched Ernesto get driven away. Somebody had to. I’ve been nursing long enough to know that not everybody can be helped. Sometimes, you just have to be there, be a witness, so they don’t pass on alone. I hope I was that for him, but I don’t know. I still feel I failed. I stood in the alley for a long time after he was gone, and when I finally left for work, I didn’t come home.
So I’m still at the hospital, Harbor-UCLA. I can’t bring myself to go home, so I just stay on and think about Ernesto and worry about my brother. He’s out there with everybody else banging and looting, I just know it. Him and what he calls his party crew. I didn’t even know what that was so I asked him to explain it to me, and he didn’t even do that. He just told me a story about how this one time, a bunch of them ditched school and had a ditching party. It was the kind of thing where everyone was taking drugs and having sex in the backyard during the day. He wouldn’t shut up about how great it was. Gangster Woodstock, that’s what he called it. I wish he was kidding. Aurelio is a lot of things, but not a liar.
Stacy must see me just standing there in the hallway so she comes over from the nursing station. “You okay, lady?”
“Long day,” I say automatically.
That usually means, don’t ask, or, it’s not over yet. For me and the other nurses, it’s like a code. We had curfew tonight all over the city. It started at dusk, the news said, but the only thing it did for us in the hospital was slow the flow from nonstop to an occasional flash flood because when people come in, they come in waves. We’re in a lull now, but it’ll pick up soon.
“Long day,” Stacy says back, smiles, and walks away, but as she’s going she kind of winks at me and points behind her clipboard at a man coming up the hall.
I follow her finger to the man known as Mister So-and-So, and that’s when my heart decides to palpitate like it was jumping rope and all of a sudden got tangled up in it.
That’s not his real name, by the way. Only me and the other nurses call him that. At first, it was because Filipina Maria—there’s two Marias, Abulog and Zaragoza—well, Maria Abulog saw him first sixteen months ago and liked what she saw even though she’s married and has three kids, but I guess she felt it was important to tell all the single nurses about him because that’s how nurses are: they either wanna set you up, or knock you down. In my experience, there’s not really much in between.
Anyways, when Filipina Maria looked at Mr. So-and-So’s name tag, she saw a last name that started with S that she couldn’t even hope to pronounce, so she just called him Mr. So-and-So, and then we all did. Pretty soon everybody got real good at being on the lookout for the tall firefighter, over six foot, with a black mustache and a chin with a dent in it, brown eyes, and good-looking eyebrows like he gets them plucked or something, but I know he doesn’t. Lots of girls have made plays for him, but he doesn’t seem interested. At least he wasn’t into Stacy and she’s all blond and an ex-volleyball player, so I don’t know what his type is. All the older nurses on the ward say he likes me, but I don’t believe them. Maybe I’m too short for him. Maybe I’m too brown.
Here’s what I know about Mr. So-and-So: his first name is Anthony, he’s thirty-six years old but I don’t know when his birthday is and that’s a shame because it would be helpful for horoscopes, he has a scar on his left cheek that looks like a lowercase letter v but I don’t know how he got it, under that scar is a dimple when he smiles but there isn’t one on the right side, he lives in San Pedro and he grew up there, his family is Croatian and I know because Teresa over in Billing is from Pedro too and she knows his family because there’s only one public high school and one tiny Catholic high school so everybody knows everybody, this is good too because Teresa also knows his family is Catholic, which is great news for my mother, if, you know, she ever met him or anything. I should probably say I’m not obsessed at all. I just like him a little.
Okay, maybe a lot. And it’s weird too, because normally I’m not so good at paying close attention to anything but my job, but with him, I can’t help it. Like, when he’s done talking to me, right before he has to go, he always bows his head a little, like he’s acknowledging me, like our talks mean something to him, too. And his hands, they’re not like normal size. They’re so big, the kind that could swoop you up, the kind that hold women tight on the covers of the silly romance books Tia Luz reads, and best of all, his left hand has got no ring on it. I asked Teresa and she says he’s never been married, just engaged once but it didn’t work out. I try not to stare when he sees me and walks toward me.
When I was just a girl, I took ballet because my mother sa
id I needed culture, and now the only thing I remember about it is how the pirouetting made me feel all dizzy and twisted up inside after. That’s how I feel when Mr. So-and-So gets close.
I’ve seen him in a few times, always with other firemen. He’s the driver. I guess they call him an engineer though, like on a train. He gets them to the fires, and if anybody’s hurt, he drives them here. His look tells me that’s why he’s here, and my heart sinks.
“Good morning, Nurse Gloria.” He says it all quiet.
He does that, calls me Nurse and my first name. I can’t think why or how it started. I like it though. It’s become our thing, the way we greet each other, so I always respond with “Good morning, Fireman Anthony.”
But he doesn’t smile at me today, and I don’t get to see his dimple, not like normal. His head is down. I know it’s because of everything going on, but even when things are bad—and when you work where we work and meet how we meet, there’s always something bad—he has a smile for me, even a little one, or a dark joke about something he saw or something he heard. He usually tries to make me smile, but not today. Today, he puts his hands in his pockets.
So that’s when I know I have to be the one to start the conversation, so I say, “From what’s coming in, it doesn’t look good out there. What’s going on?”
I touch his triceps softly and drop my hand quick. I want him to know I care, but at the same time, I don’t want him to know I care. My heart’s kind of fluttery, like it remembers tripping over the jump rope and it’s a little wary. I look him over to make sure he isn’t hurt or anything, not even a little bit.
“Uh” is what he says. Nothing else.
I know not to push it. You hear things in the hospital. You see things. We treated eleven firemen last night that I know of—and trust me, I checked every single name when they came in. One of them had been shot, but he made it through surgery and could pull through. There might’ve been more. It seems like firemen got it the worst that first day. Everything was so disorganized and there were no cops to protect them, so they got shot at. It seems better now, but still not great. I even heard there were sniper attacks on Fire Stations 9, 16, and 41. As soon as the engines left the stations, people started shooting.
So if I’m acting weird at all, or jumpy, just forgive me because I didn’t know if Mr. So-and-So would be safe or if I’d see him again, and women sometimes do strange things when they don’t know if they’ll see somebody-that-might-end-up-being-really-special-to-them again. That’s what my abuela said anyways, and she was an expert on all kinds of things, especially on being a woman.
“You be sure to take care of him,” Mr. So-and-So finally says.
I don’t know who he’s talking about exactly, but I know we got one more firefighter to take care of now. I’ll ask Stacy about it later, after he’s gone. Mr. So-and-So bows his head a little right then, and before he looks back down the hall the way he came—because he always does that right after bowing his head—I say, “You have to go.”
He gives me a look like he’s not sure how I know that, but I just give him a little smile, hoping he’ll give me one in return. He doesn’t.
“Be safe out there,” I say.
He nods and goes. He doesn’t look back at me. I try not to take it personal but it burns a little in my chest. When he’s a few steps away, I see dried blood on the back of his neck and immediately I want to reach out and hold him, inspect him, make sure he’s okay and it’s not his blood, but I know I can’t—that’d just be weird of me—so I let out a frustrated-and-flustered-and-worried sigh and start walking.
2
To distract me from how I’m feeling, I go where I was supposed to go before, a patient’s room in Neuro ICU for a postsurgical vitals check. This one came in with a bullet hole in his left cheek and his toxicology test off the chart. Get this, he got shot from behind at an angle, so the bullet went in through his cheek and out through his open mouth so there was no exit wound, but he wasn’t responding when he came in and no one could figure out why. That is, until we did an MRI and found a brain tumor.
“A miracle.” That’s what the attending called it at the time. “This sonofabitch has a tumor the size of a golf ball in his frontal lobe and enough cocaine in him to kill a horse, but still he’s up and walking around? If he’s not shot in the head, maybe we never find it. More things in heaven and earth, Nurse Rubio.”
I don’t know what that last part means, but I know his surgery went perfect. The tumor was superficial to the surface and came out with an area of normal tissue entirely around it, and now he’s on my ward taking up a bed, so my mission is to be the bad guy and clear him as soon as I can, because we have admitted patients taking up lobby chairs around here. Under normal circumstances, he’d be here two to three days, but a riot and martial law isn’t normal circumstances.
When I pull the sliding screen, he’s awake. He’s got gauze and tape on his face, covering his whole cheek, and new stitches scabbing dark red on his cranium. His chart used to say John Doe, but someone before me scratched that out and wrote Antonio Delgado. He looks cute in a broken kind of way, at least so long as he doesn’t open his mouth. Some girls go for that type. Not me, though. Not anymore.
“Nurse, hi,” he says, ruining it. “Hi, Nurse. My name’s Antonio. Annnnn-to-ni-o. But people that know me call me Lil Creeper.”
He giggles at that. He really cracks himself up. This is good news, I guess, because it means his morphine drip is working.
Pathology came back and said it was a low-grade astrocytoma, malignant as hell. But we caught it early, which is good, because if we hadn’t, he could have been dead in twelve months or less. So, in a way, getting shot saved his life. Incredible. How is it the cockroaches of the world have all the luck but the good ones like Ernesto never seem to? I’ll never understand that.
I check his intracranial pressure first, which is normal considering, and then his blood pressure. It’s 139/90, a little on the high side, but that’s perfect, because it means it’ll still push nutrients to the brain through the swelling.
“My heart might be getting fast cuz you’re close. Maybe you should check again?”
Yeah, right. I deflate the cuff, pull it off, and shine my light in his eyes. His pupils are reactive, constricting perfectly and symmetrically. More or less on one or the other might mean a problem, but for now, he’s good enough for me to discharge to Skilled Nursing as soon as he’s stable for twenty-four hours, and, according to me, that will be ten hours from now. I’m noting this when a sick feeling hits me. I know this patient.
This is the little junkie that Mrs. Nantakarn is sure stole every one of her good china plates last year for no reason, because it’s not like you can sell them for anything much, and she had to buy them back at the swap meet a week later. Him and my brother were the same year in school. I’m sure they know each other. Of course, I don’t need to draw attention to that.
“Look at you,” Antonio says. He squints like he’s thinking. “I know you.”
Great, just great. Already I feel the side of me I’m so good at hiding at work about to come out. Just being near this fool brings the neighborhood out in me. Rather than wait for him to put together how he knows me, I decide to go on the offensive. “Yeah? Well, I know you, too. Why’d you steal all them pretty plates last year?”
He smiles like I caught him, but he’s smooth too. He slides right out of it.
“I’d never steal nothing, Sleepy’s number one big sister. Never in my life. You’re insulting me saying that.”
I give him a look that says I-can-see-through-you, so-sell-your-bullshit-to-some-other-chick-that-don’t-know-no-better.
He sees that and his face changes, almost looks more sad and vulnerable and that stops me for a second before he says, “Okay, but maybe I’d steal one thing.”
It’s a setup. I see his shit coming a mile away. Grow up in my neighborhood and make enough mistakes with terrible guys, you can too. It wasn’t easy, but I ha
d to learn somehow. What ties all the guys that treated me bad together is how good they were at lying to me, and how stupid I was and ate it all up. So with this little one, I put my hand on my hip, like, come-on-I-don’t-got-all-day. Cuz for his type, I don’t, and I never will again.
He pauses way too long because he thinks he’s smooth and I’m already turning to leave when he says, “I’d steal your heart.”
My laugh comes out so high and fast it surprises me a little. It’s like a bark almost. This little boy couldn’t have my heart if he cut it out of me. It’s already kind of set on someone else, a good guy for once, except maybe that guy doesn’t know it yet, or if he did know, maybe he wouldn’t care, but I hope he would. I hope.
I guess I pause there, just a touch, and this kid, because that’s what he is, all of nineteen, completely misreads it. He thinks it’s for him!
“Come on,” Antonio says, all confident. “I’ll take you to Sam’s and everything! I’m good for it. I’ll let you order steak and shrimp cuz that’s what type of guy I am. I’ll treat you right.”
Like this fool ever knew what it meant to treat a girl right. If I’d never left the block, that might sound pretty good, but I have, so it doesn’t. Besides, no self-respecting girl in her right mind wants to go to Sam’s Hofbrau. That place calls itself an adult cabaret, but it’s just a dirty-ass strip club with pizza and fried food and ghetto girls shaking their soon-to-be-diabetic asses. It’s where the gangsters and wannabe-gangsters throw money around like they’re somebody, that’s what my brother says.
“No thanks,” I say.
“Fine,” he says, “but you’re missing out!”
I drop his chart in the slot at the foot of his bed and he knows I’m lost to him, so he starts serenading me with “Rock Around the Clock,” except he’s not saying clock, he’s saying something else that my abuela raised me not to repeat, but it’s slang for penis.
