Diamond in the Rough

by Peter Canning

  You never knew what your day held for you or what you would discover next. Nothing was as it seemed. You can hold no assumptions about the world. We went to a group home for a patient with a urinary tract infection. It was a fifty-seven-year old woman with a famous last name—a name of a prominent political family. She had no history other than suffering a bout of scarlet fever as a child, and coming out of her coma with the mind of a twelve-year-old girl who would never grow older. Her mental development was frozen in time. She was a delightful conversationalist in the way that twelve year olds are, and I was able to get from her the story of how she came to be in that home, while her family members partied on exclusive islands, promoted liberal social agendas, yet hadn’t been to visit her for years. “They are very busy, important people,” she said without a hint of irony.

  The same day I responded to the house of a notorious scoundrel, a man who had defrauded thousands of area people in a stock scam, and was soon for prison. We found him calming his handicapped son, a boy with Down’s syndrome, who had fallen and broken his leg, the bone breaking through the skin. I will never forget that way he rubbed the boy’s hair, and whispered in his ear, calming the pain he had to be feeling long enough until Tom could give his son some morphine.

  Appearances could fool you. I went into hole-in-the-wall restaurants whose kitchens were as immaculate as if they had scrubbed the floor with toothbrushes, and went into the kitchens of trendy restaurants where people were waiting in line to get in, but where, after seeing the caked grease on the walls and watching the roaches skitter across the floor as we treated a cook who had fallen and injured his shoulder, I would not have sent my dog in there to eat.

  I saw lots of gross stuff. I had thought Fred was making some shit up when I listened to his stories before I had put the uniform on myself, but having been out there I could only say, you couldn’t make the shit up. I saw maggots growing out of people’s heads, a man chopped up by a mechanical hole-driller and turned into hamburger; I saw another man cut completely in half in an industrial accident. You learned there were good ways to go and bad ways, and all I could say was: take me in the night while I sleep, but not in a fire, but if it is in a fire, let the smoke kill me before the flames touch my skin. If hell was a real place (and sometimes I thought it was), if there was fire there and people knew what that would be like and that it would burn them, we would have no problems here on earth. There would be no need for police officers. And I would have no story to tell.

  Chapter 10

  The first time I thought about stealing, we were called for a welfare check in an elderly housing complex. Neighbors hadn’t seen the man for a few days and his small mailbox in the front foyer of the apartment complex was overflowing with circulars. The supervisor was summoned to let us and a police officer in, while all down the corridor, old ladies stood at their half-open doors, watching us.

  We found him in the bedroom naked on his bed. He was an old dude. I guessed around seventy. He had his hand around his dick, rigored into place.

  “Coming and going at the same time,” Tom said.

  After that, Tom ran his six-second strip of flat line for documentation.

  The officer was looking at a set of Polaroids on the bed stand: a skinny woman with bad teeth in various poses and some shots just of her beaver. He and Tom were having a good chuckle over them.

  I put a sheet over the man.

  “We got a name on him?” Tom asked the officer, who shook his head.

  “I’ll check,” I said.

  I had already gone over to the refrigerator to see if he had a vial of life—information that listed his name, insurance numbers and all his meds that we often looked for when we responded, but the only thing on the refrigerator was another Polaroid of the same skanky woman holding a little girl in her arms. I opened the refrigerator to see if the vial was inside, but the refrigerator was bare except for a carton of milk, a carton of eggs and a carton of orange juice. Nothing else. I opened a cabinet and found ten unopened boxes of Fruity Pebbles cereal, ten or more neatly stacked cans of beef stew, five neatly arranged boxes of pancake mix. Four unopened bottles of maple syrup. Tom and the officer were still looking at the Polaroids and talking about sex.

  I opened a dresser drawer—all neatly folded white underwear. The next drawer was all neatly folded socks. It was getting creepy. Just then I saw a white legal-size mailing envelope under the socks. I pulled it out. There were thousands of dollars in it, maybe thirty neatly folded one hundred dollar bills. These weren’t crisp bills, they were old, but they had been carefully unwrinkled. I got the impression they had been put in one at a time.

  I thought about how easy it would be to just put it in my pocket, but at the time stealing hadn’t seemed to me like a thing someone would do on a job like mine.

  I saw another envelope then, and in it was a letter.

  Dear Angie.

  I am sorry I have not been able to be a father to you. You mother will not let me see you. I watch you in the playground some afternoons. I hope you grow up to be a lawyer.

  Your loving Dad.

  In the envelope there was a picture of him as a younger man—maybe in his fifties in an ill-fitting business suit.

  I don’t know what possessed me, but I took the letter and put it in the manila envelope with the money. I sealed the envelope up and wrote “Angie College Fund” on the outside and underneath that wrote “lawyer” and “courthouse” and underscored it three times. I left it on top of the dresser.

  I don’t know if that accomplished anything. I just hoped somehow the girl would get the letter and the money and not the skank mom or anyone else who happened on it. Maybe it would get in the hands of someone who knew how to find her and how to set up a fund and let her know the man loved her. But I had a sinking feeling it would end up in someone else’s pocket, and then I wished for a moment that I had pocketed it and gone looking for the girl myself, but I saw the difficulties in that and in explaining how I came to hold her money. Best just follow the rules.

  I heard Tom say, “He’s got an ID in his wallet.” He took it out and wrote down the information. Neither of them had even noticed what I had been doing.

  When we walked out of the room, the ladies in the hall were still watching. I asked the one across the hall if she knew him.

  “He keeps to himself,” she said.

  “That’s right,” the woman at the next door said. “He don’t say nothing to anyone.”

  “Does his young daughter ever come by?”

  “He have a daughter? That old man? He have a daughter?”

  And all the ladies started cackling and saying, “My lord.”

  Tom was looking at me like he couldn’t understand what I was talking about.

  “He’s all right?” she asked.

  “All right? He’s dead,” Tom said.

  The ladies all went silent, hands on their hearts.

  “Stone cold,” Tom said, and walked on down the hall.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to none of them in particular.

  Chapter 11

  The worst thing I saw was called anthropophagi. You can look it up in the dictionary, or wait a moment and figure it out for yourself from what I will tell you. The story comes in two parts. Part one, we are called for weakness. It is a nice house in a middle-class neighborhood in a suburban town. The door to the house is locked, but with the dispatcher communicating with the caller over the phone we learn there is a key under a flowerpot outside the front porch. “The key-under-the-flowerpot routine,” I say to Tom. “I should have thought that. Forgive me.”

  “Don’t let it happen again,” he said, and cuffed me on the back of the head.

  We open the door and are met by two dogs, a tiny white poodle and a larger mixed breed. They bark, then turn and head down the hall, just as we hear a female voice from the end of the hallway say, “I’m down here.”

  The house is dirty and with the empty feel of someone who has moved out, but not c
leaned up yet. There is missing furniture, partially filled boxes, take-out cartons of Chinese food and pizza boxes on the table in front of the TV, some beer cans, cigarette butts overflowing their trays. The carpets smell of urine.

  She is lying on a mattress on the floor. A skinny woman maybe in her mid-thirties with long blonde hair and the most beautiful blue eyes, eyes that grab you even though she is sort of skanky, eyes that make you see the beautiful woman she was once. You could imagine her younger at a bar or a party on the arm of some charismatic bad boy who no doubt led her down a wrong path, and then left her. “My back hurts and I can’t get out of bed,” she says. “I’m out of my pain meds. I need to go to the hospital. I can’t take it anymore.”

  I can see the track marks on her arms. She is just wearing a thong and a loose armless tee-shirt. I can see that Tom, despite himself, is checking her body out. I am too. I guess if I was a skanked-out heroin addict, I could see myself spending the afternoon shooting up with her.

  We help her up on to the stretcher, and get her bundled up.

  “You have someone to take care of the dogs?” Tom asks.

  “No, I just got rid of my boyfriend,” she says. “I’m all alone. I haven’t fed them for a couple days, but as soon as I get my meds, I’ll get to the store and take care of that. Maybe you could check their water bowls for me?”

  Tom filled their bowls and teched the call, even though he didn’t do any ALS. I wondered if it was just her eyes or if maybe he was dog enough to be angling for something else. Tom had more women than I could imagine, but it seemed he was never satisfied.

  “She was a skank,” he said, when we cleared the hospital. “A drug-seeking skank.”

  “Is that why you teched the call?”

  “She’s got the virus,” he said.

  “There went your dinner date.”

  “Ha ha. I was just protecting you in case she offered to service you for a ten spot. I know it’s been a while since you’ve had it, and she had that desperateness in her eyes.”

  I never pretended Tom was my friend, but I looked up to him, and it hurt when he ranked on me.

  “I know you’re not like your pal Fred,” he said, “but I can’t be too sure. Better safe than sorry.”

  I just looked out the window. Was I that desperate for companionship that it showed so clearly?

  ***

  A week later we were called to the same house on a welfare check. We didn’t realize it was the same house until we found ourselves standing at the doorway with Jimmie Winslow, a Hartford cop, unable to get in. Jimmie was calling back the dispatcher for information about how to get in when I announced, “The keys are under the flowerpot.” I lifted the pot up and produced the key. The cop was impressed.

  “He’s clairvoyant,” Tom said.

  “Well, Mr. Kreskin, what are we going to find inside?” Jimmie asked as I turned the key in the door.

  I looked down and saw the little white poodle with a splotch of red on his cheek.

  “Nothing good,” I said, and then the smell hit us.

  The floor was littered with dog feces. We stepped gingerly as we went slowly through the house looking for the source of the odor, which we knew too well was a decomposing body. Suddenly down the hall I had a quick glimpse of big dog darting past—almost like a wolf in a thick forest in a scary movie. There one moment, then gone the next.

  “She’s down there,” I said, pointing to the end of the hall. “That’s where she was when we were here before.”

  I followed Jimmie down. He was six-four, two-fifty, but he had his hand just a few inches from his holster. I have to say there was a good deal of suspense as we tiptoed down that hall like we were trying to sneak up on death itself, which we were, although it, as always, had a surprise for us.

  Jimmie swore, and then turned and left the room retching. I stood in the doorway and stared. Tom, despite being an absolutely top-of-the-line medic, had a weak stomach when it came to dead bodies. He usually let me handle the presumptions, relying on me to alert him to the borderline calls. There was nothing borderline about this call. The woman wasn’t just dead. She looked like that character from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Her head was a skeleton. It looked just like one of those bony skeletons that used to hang in the classroom. Where her pretty eyes had once been, there was nothing. Her face had been eaten off so much that the back of her head had fallen away like a ripped bag. You could see tufts of her long hair scattered about the room. I imagined the dogs ripping the hair off her head, as they tugged at her.

  Jimmie stood beside me now. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You think there’s foul play in this?”

  “More like canine play,” I said. “I think they just hadn’t been fed for a while. She was a junkie. We’ve picked her up before. She probably shot up and died, and they were just trying to get her up so she could get them some food. That’s why they pulled her hair off. I guess they were just really hungry and she was the only food they could get. “

  “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.

  “Of course, I suppose it could be a crime. It wouldn’t have been a burglar because there’s nothing to steal here. Maybe her ex-boyfriend came back, strangled her, and smeared puppy chow on her face.”

  “You’re sick.”

  “She had the most beautiful eyes,” I said, remembering, and I thought about them now, rolling around inside one of those dog’s stomachs, and I confess, I felt nauseous myself.

  Tom gave me the monitor and let me run a strip for him. I found her name on a state welfare envelope. While we wrote up the paperwork, a couple other officers and animal control had arrived. They were trying to corral the dogs. The little dog they already had in a small cage. The big dog was more of a problem. The animal control officer held a pole with a noose around the end. Jimmie, his hand shaking, held out a dog biscuit.

  The dog growled, showing his teeth.

  “He’s not interested in the biscuit,” I said.

  ***

  For a long time afterwards I wondered what the woman of the house was thinking as she looked down on what had happened or looked up from the hot seats. Would she be horrified? Watching as her loved pets ripped her face apart? Or would she have some empathy for them, understanding that they had done what they had done to fill a basic need—the need to survive, and maybe even being glad that she had been able to keep them alive in their days alone in the wilderness that house had become. I like to think that she was in a place where she knew no pain, where her face showed no sign of the hardships of her life, and that there was mercy in her beautiful eyes.

  Chapter 12

  “Tell ’em about your call,” Fred said. “The one you did with Tom Spencer.”

  And everyone around the table looked at me. I looked at Fred, stunned that he was asking me to speak.

  “Go on,” he said. “You were the stud. Tell it.”

  “Okay, I guess.” I knew I was blushing, but I saw people looking at me now with interest, plus Carrie was sitting there with her girlfriends, and I saw the way she was looking at me like she really was interested, or curious at least to hear me.

  “Not much to tell,” I said. “Me and Tom, my partner, were driving down Collins Street in 453 after leaving Saint Fran. I saw something that didn’t look right, so I said, ’Hold it a minute. Shit. There’s smoke coming out of the window. The building’s on fire.’ Tom called it in on the radio and I got out and started shouting at people to get out of the building. The front door was open so I ran in, went up and down the halls banging on doors, shouting, ‘Get out, get out, the building’s on fire!’ I went upstairs, and that’s where it was smoky. I’d been in the building before, so I knew how the hall hooked to the right once you got on the second floor. I was just shouting and banging, and people were yelling back, but once they heard what I was saying, they all came out, and went out and got in the front yard. I helped one lady with her kids, and when we got outside, Fire was just pulling up, and I
looked up and I could see flames flying off the roof.”

  “Flying,” Fred said. “The place was completely engulfed. I was there by then and I saw him come out holding that little girl. You’re one crazy fucking dude, I’ll tell you, to go charging up the second floor of a building smoking like that. He saved that family’s life, not to mention everybody else in the building, a bunch of fucking drugged-out, liquored-up, lazy-ass welfare families, but still he saved their lives. I won’t be surprised if he gets a medal for it. You done well there. And I take full credit for bringing you into the trade. Raise our glasses. Tim, my brother, you’re the man tonight!”

  They raised their glasses and toasted me, and said kind things, and I didn’t tell any of them that immediately afterwards I had hidden in the back of the ambulance and cried because I had been scared, knowing how easily I could have died, running through that building with the smoke suddenly so thick, I could hardly see my feet, and it got so hot in there, and hearing the woman cry, and banging into her and feeling the girl, and lifting her up into my arms, and then I whacked my head so hard I almost dropped her, and my head still hurt and rang from it, and then being so thankful to see the stairs again, and making it back out alive, watching the mother crying as she took the girl from me and held her. I knew I never would have done it if I had known what it would have been like. I had only done it because I hadn’t known better. My heroism was, in fact, a fraud.

  A little while later, when the news came on, it was the lead story. “Firefighters rescue city dwellers as building burns. Four Hartford families were lucky to be alive tonight as emergency personnel’s quick response helped evacuate the building…” And a TV news crew happened to be driving by as well, and they filmed me coming out with the girl in my arms, looking dazed.