Population: 485

by Michael Perry

  The girl is still lying there, trapped but alive and conscious, two miles outside of town, when the siren on the water tower goes off, rising and falling three times. Help is still a ways off. There is no ambulance in New Auburn. Depending on the location of the telephone pole you clip, an ambulance will be dispatched from a town nine miles to the north or nine miles to the south of our village. Today the ambulance will be coming from the south, from Bloomer. From the time the call comes in until the ambulance arrives, fifteen minutes will pass. In the meantime, we’ll respond with two fire trucks and a rescue van. A few of us on the department are EMTs and first responders—we arrive with a pack of rudimentary medical supplies and do our best to stabilize the situation until more definitive help arrives. Sometimes that means crawling into a tangled car in an attempt to keep an unconscious victim breathing. Sometimes it means simply holding the hand of a sickly grandmother or a suicidal farmer.

  Today, the pumper will drive to the vehicle in case a fire should break out, or a gasoline spill needs to be contained and controlled. The van and the tanker will be used to control traffic. Securing the scene, it’s called. Shutting traffic down makes a lot of people cranky, but it is vital for the safety of the victims and those helping the victims.

  And so the girl waits. But we are on our way now, coming from all sides of town, converging on the little white fire hall. Inside, the light is dim and the brick walls are cool. The coats and boots wait in their rows, the trucks are still.

  It was never my dream to be a firefighter, or to scream around the country in an ambulance. It all began when I graduated from nursing school and found myself frustrated by the fact that here I was, freshly armed with a bachelor’s degree in the caring arts, steeped in holism and paradigms and able, if need be, to catheterize you in a trice, but I knew nothing of how to extricate someone safely from a pancaked Yugo, or splint a dislocated elbow. My first nursing job was for a surgeon in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. After moving to Rice Lake, I enrolled in a 115-hour emergency medical technician class through the regional technical school and subsequently passed the National Registry exam. When a new nursing job took me to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, I hired on part-time with a private ambulance service in that town. We served a large metropolitan and rural area, as well as a long stretch of I-94. When I reported for my first day of work, the first-out rig was gone to a nasty accident on the interstate. A van had driven full speed into the back of a parked semi. When the rig finally returned, the lead EMT looked me over, fresh in my new uniform. “We were out scraping up an ohsh,” he said. Long o, short sh.

  “An ohsh?”

  “An ohsh,” he repeated. “Guy in the van only left six feet of skid marks.”

  I still didn’t get it. The veteran EMT chuckled. “An ohsh is when you look up at the last second, see the rear end of that semi, scream, ‘Oh, shit!,’ but only make it to ‘Oh, sh…!’”

  Within a year, I’d been on more than two hundred calls. I could drop the ohsh thing on newbies. I stayed on as a part-timer for more than five years, and when I moved back to New Auburn, it just seemed natural to continue some association with emergency services. But I have long since lost the ability to be flip about things like the ohsh.

  Today, when I see the girl there on the blacktop, all that seasoned veteran hoo-hah will go right out the window, because she is delicate and frightened and conscious, and most of all, she is one of us. When we gather around her we are firefighters and first responders and EMTs, but we are also neighbors, classmates, family. If she doesn’t make it, I’m going to see her parents around town. It happens. Last year we had a heart attack call, found the woman too far gone, with signs she’d been dead awhile. Not long, but too long. The woman’s teenage daughter was there, teary and expectant, but there was nothing we could do. The following weekend, I was sitting at a folding table in front of the gas station selling raffle tickets for our fire department fund-raiser when the girl drove in with a friend. I had to look her in the eye, ask her how it was going. Me, worthless in her mother’s hour of death, now selling two-dollar chances to win a trip to Orlando, a beer cooler, a deer rifle, a four-pack of insulated Packer mugs. We do this whole pitch. How each ticket sold helps us raise money for critical equipment, equipment that helps us improve our service to the community. The spiel takes on a whole different significance when you’re speaking to the daughter of someone you were utterly unable to help. Another time, my brother and I drove the ambulance up a long back road where a woman was having a stroke. Her adult granddaughter rode with us to the hospital. Three days later, in the grocery store, I exited the fruit-juice aisle and came face-to-face with the granddaughter, all made up and wearing a discreet black dress.

  I inquired after Grandma.

  “We just came from the funeral mass,” said the woman.

  And yet she was kind, praising my brother and me for the gentle way we had handled Grandma, for the way we had accommodated the family.

  The girl is lying on the road because she came into the curve a little too fast, or a little too wide, or both, it only matters that she overcorrected, and instead of flying over the embankment, the car boomeranged across the centerline, skidding and rolling and shuddering to rest below some Norway pines on the inside shoulder of the curve, which seems counterintuitive to physics. Somewhere in the tumbling, she was thrown from the car, then dragged beneath its great weight. The blacktop is scored with evidence.

  I remember pulling up in the pumper, leaving it parked by Jabowski’s. Wally, another new guy on the department, was riding shotgun, and he stayed back to stop traffic. I remember gallumphing down the hill toward the clot of people, blue medical kit over one shoulder, bunkers slapping at my legs, the cleated heels of my steel-toed rubber boots thudding on the pavement. I remember the cluster of rescuers, and I remember the chief standing on the asphalt, directing people and traffic, poking the air with his radio antenna like a conductor waving a baton. My mother took the EMT class with me all those years ago, and she is there, as is my sister. My sister will begin her junior year of high school at summer’s end. She was preparing for a friend’s wedding shower when the call came, and rode along in case my mother needed an extra pair of hands. Looking down when she arrives, she recognizes the girl on the road. Tracy Rimes is a year older than my sister, due to start her senior year, but they used to gossip in the same study hall. With three EMTs in the family, my sister has been the “victim” of many training exercises, and when my mother shows her how to hold Tracy’s head in careful alignment, she knows what to do. While my mother unzips her oxygen kit and hooks up a breathing mask, my sister talks to Tracy, and Tracy answers. Later, when the day is older, and we are all back in our homes, I will marvel at my sister’s composure. She was a toddler when I left home. Here she looks shaken but steady. It is a test, and she is strong in the face of it.

  There is so much to do. I relieve my sister, our hands touching as we perform the delicate handoff of Tracy’s head. From here I can get my bearings, see what we’re facing, what needs to be done. I can see that Tracy’s right leg is badly injured. The femur, the large bone in her upper leg, is fractured. This is dangerous. You can bleed enough from this injury alone to die. The hemorrhaging is all internal, between the spaces of the muscles. Compartmental bleeding, it’s called. She has other injuries as well. One look at her, and the chief ordered a medical helicopter. Even if the ambulance runs like hell, it will take nearly forty-five minutes to get her to the nearest trauma center. From the time you begin your training as an EMT you are drilled and drilled on the concept of the “Golden Hour,” in which the odds of a patients surviving a severe traumatic event decline precipitously if they do not receive definitive treatment within sixty minutes. By the time the ambulance arrives, fifteen to twenty minutes of that hour will already be spent. So thirty miles away, a chopper has risen into the air and is headed our way.

  Back by Jabowski’s, and around the bend to the east, traffic has been stopped, and firefighters become fla
gpersons, turning travelers back, sending them on a twelve-mile detour. Other firefighters are preparing a landing zone, marking it out back in the curve right about at the spot where the car first left the road. Meanwhile, we are doing what we can for Tracy. Communication is critical and we think aloud. Jack Most, a feed mill operator who was my math tutor in fifth grade, readies a reserve tank of oxygen. His brother Bob, a butcher, puts a plastic collar around Tracy’s neck. The ambulance arrives with more equipment, and we keep working, wanting to have her ready to go—“packaged,” it’s called in EMS terms—when the chopper arrives. Her leg is causing her great pain, so we apply a traction splint, a racklike device that attaches at the ankle and, with a ratcheting action, pulls the leg straight. This draws the bone ends apart. With Tracy, the relief is instantaneous.

  Still, Tracy is growing more and more apprehensive, and her color is getting worse. Her lung sounds are diminishing on the left side. Pneumothorax. Each time she takes a breath, air rushes through a hole in her lung. Left unchecked, this air will fill the space between the chest wall and the lung, pushing the lung out of place until it collapses. This is a true emergency, and must be treated quickly, with equipment we do not have. I look at her eyes and see fear. We talk to her, reassure her that help is on the way. I do not tell her everything will be all right. I have never been able to tell my patients everything will be all right.

  We have her strapped to a hard plastic litter now, packaged and ready for the chopper. For a moment, there is time to reassess. We keep checking her vital signs—blood pressure, pulse, respirations—shine a light in her eyes to check the reaction of her pupils. We talk to one another, ask if we’ve missed anything. Recheck the splint, recheck the straps, double-check the amount of oxygen left in the tank, fetch another one for backup. Tracy’s breathing is getting worse. We are all sneaking peeks to the sky, looking for the chopper. Now a man is kneeling by the girl’s shoulder, speaking to her intently, his face tight with fear. She reaches to him. It is her father. “I love you, Tracy,” he says. “You be strong.”

  Suddenly there it is. The chopper, cresting a pine copse. It approaches with a thunderous buzz, an iron blue dragonfly, circling, hovering, then, in a wash of wind and grit, settling to the centerline.

  Two flight nurses exit the chopper, stooped over and running with tackle boxes; the first nurse takes one look at the girl there, gasping and losing color, and says, “We need a chest tube.” Out come iodine swabs, forceps, tubing, a shockingly huge needle. Within seconds she drives the needle between Tracy’s ribs. Air rushes out, and almost immediately, the girl’s breathing and color improve. A few other tasks are quickly dispatched—an IV line, another set of vital signs—and then we are hunched over, feeding the stretcher into the thrumming chopper. Shielding our eyes from the downwash, we scuttle away as the chopper rises, banks, and is gone over the treetops. The chief turns the scene over to the captain and hustles away to drive the father to the hospital. The father was once the chief of the department. The two men have history.

  Later, walking back to the pumper, I reflect on the call. It went well. We handled it well. We talked our way through the confusion and fear and mess, and it seems we did all the right things, limited though they might be. A long line of cars was waiting atop the hill, and suddenly a woman jumped out of one and called my name. She ran up and hugged me. It was a high-school girlfriend. I hadn’t seen her for years. It was a fine moment, standing there sweaty in my T-shirt and bunkers, with this beautiful woman hugging me, and me remembering her spearmint kisses that first night on the basketball bus. After we said good-bye again, I wondered if the deadly crotch-high pipe still stood behind Jabowski’s house, and I began to realize how this fire department was a means of reentry, of rediscovering the place I had left a decade before, of recapturing my sense of place one tragedy at a time. I was realizing that this service is a privilege, a way to weave myself back into the fabric of a place. Today we had tragedy, but it was our tragedy, and we dealt with it not only as public citizens, but also as friends and neighbors. I am not an optimistic sort, but I felt good that day, driving that tanker back toward a little town that was reemerging from memory, across land I feel in my guts. To feel at home is a rare, precious thing, and I began to feel at home that day.

  The word came back through town. Tracy didn’t survive the night. To the ghosts of this land, we add another ghost.

  That was seven years ago. Last night I biked out to Highway M, around Jabowski’s Corner. The afternoon had been stormy. Rain was rising from the asphalt, the steam fat with the black smell of tar. The pavement is aromatic because it is new; since Tracy died, the corner has been recut and reshaped, the roadbed raised and the camber adjusted. I cycle through the flattened curve, following as the highway straightens and drops eastward, a soft declining line bisecting the leafy plenty of August. The land is settling into an easy evening, and into that season where everything that has risen up prepares to fade and fall, this death blanketing last year’s death. The land is at ease with the idea of mortality. But the sky…cumulonimbus clouds are stacked and banked to the stratosphere, and the lowering sun has bronzed and brassed and blushed them. These are clouds to make you long for wings. These are clouds that leave you not knowing what to believe.

  2

  BEAGLE

  YOU’D JUMP TOO, if you yanked the fire-hall door open at three A.M. and found the One-Eyed Beagle in your face. The Beagle is a butcher, and he looks it. His knuckles are knife-scarred. His forearms and biceps are thick with years of hoisting half-beefs from the meat hook to the cutting table. A Fu Manchu mustache brackets his mouth, the gray whiskers dropping straight to his jawline. His lip—even at three A.M., especially at three A.M.—is always jammed with chaw. But with the Beagle, it’s the eyes that put the startle in you. Several years ago, the Beagle donated a kidney to his niece. He came out of surgery with one eye inexplicably crossed. He jokes about it. His given name is Bob, but he’ll be the first to hip you to the One-Eyed Beagle thing.

  The eye isn’t just crossed, it is out to lunch. If Beagle points his nose south, his right eye shoots due east. Any more easterly, and it is headed back around the bend. And so you understand that when I got to the hall, after running from my house through backyards in the dark, thinking I was the first one there, when Bob rared up right off the end of my snoot, I went a little pop-eyed.

  “Scared ya there, Mikey!”

  The Beagle has been on the department for more than twenty-five years. Only the chief has more seniority. The Beagle can tell you some stories. He remembers when the old pumper was the new pumper. He once broke his ankle in the line of duty. He was running to the hall in his cowboy boots and landed wrong when he jumped the ditch. The cowboy boots are trouble. He’ll hit a patch of ice, and his feet get to zip-zip-zipping—it looks like a hairy version of Riverdance. Lately he has switched to slip-on tennies. Gives him an edge, he says. The Beagle and I are pretty much equidistant to the fire-hall door. We’re usually the first ones there, and it’s always a little race to see who gets to drive the van.

  Two things you can count on when you jump in a rig with the Beagle: you’re going to get a whiff of wintergreen, and you’re going to get a detailed report of exactly where he was and what he was doing when the page went off. Every call starts that way. Somewhere in that first half mile he’ll give you the update. “Damn, I was just sittin’ down to eat, and I heard Bloomer paged over the scanner and I said, ‘That’s our area,’ so I started gettin’ my shoes on, and sure enough here come the page!” “Hell, I was in the shower, and I thought I heard the damn pager go off…” “Me and the ol’ lady…”

  The whiff of wintergreen you get because the Beagle doesn’t make a move without a fresh plug of Kodiak. After all these years, the cud slips in between his cheek and gum like an afterthought and stays there. You think he’d take it out at mealtime, but he says no. “I could eat an apple, I got that big a pouch in there,” he says.

  You’ll smell the win
tergreen, but you’ll never see the Beagle spit. He is of the man-enough-to-chew, man-enough-to-swallow school. My pancreas cramps at the thought of it. He says his dad called him the other day, told him to bring over a tin of Kodiak. The Beagle found this strange, because his dad is always getting on him to quit the chew. Turns out Dad’s dog had worms, and he wanted the tobacco for a dewormer. The Beagle said it was a tussle, but they got a wad of snoose down Shep’s gullet.

  “That dog shit worms for a week!” said the Beagle. We were sitting around the fire hall at four in the morning, back from some call.

  “And what does that tell you, Beagle?” I had to say it, to set him up. “I sure as hell ain’t got worms!”

  You create a fire department out of citizen volunteers, you’re going to get some characters. A while back, we had a car fire during the day. The siren went off, and when we converged at the hall, there were exactly four of us. The assistant chief, who left his small-engine repair business unattended. Beagle, the cross-eyed butcher. Lane, a lean, wiry man who lives to ride rodeo bulls. And me. Lane recently had the muscles of his right forearm stripped from the bone in a factory accident. His arm is splinted, his hand feels nothing. We head out into the country, find the fire, put it out. Afterward we joke with the chief. About how he got stuck on a command consisting of one firefighter with one eye, one firefighter with one arm, and one firefighter who became the first volunteer in village history to miss the monthly meeting because of a poetry reading.