by Callan Wink
He asked the other EMTs how they did it, coped with the constant trauma. Margie suggested meditating. That hadn’t worked. Tim said that he ran every day, no matter what. Dale tried this, and was surprised that it seemed to settle him in some way. Everyone said you became numb to it, or if not numb then just more able to break it down into a series of responses you needed to make to perform your job. Every situation, no matter how horrific, had a starting point, a place you could insert yourself to go to work.
He had to do something. He knew that. He’d floundered for three years at the university in Missoula, changed majors four times, finally just decided to not return for what should have been his senior year.
He’d been in the bar, drinking with some friends, half-watching a football game, when an old guy a few stools down keeled over and hit the floor, his back in a reverse arc, the cords of his neck straining, lips going blue. Dale stood up, looking around. Someone had his phone out, making the call. A guy that had been sitting at a table with a woman—maybe they were on a date, they were both kind of dressed up—came hustling over. He got down next to the old man, turned him on his side. He’d taken his jacket off and rolled it up under the old man’s head. He was holding his arm, saying things to him that Dale couldn’t hear. Aaron Edgerly, one of Dale’s friends, walked over, started saying something about jamming his wallet in the old guy’s mouth so he wouldn’t choke on his tongue, but the man waved him off.
“Just stand back,” he said. “If you want to do something, clear these barstools away. They’re going to need to get in here with a stretcher.”
Aaron grumbled a little. But he put his wallet away, started moving stools. There was something in the man’s voice, ex-military probably. He was calm when everyone else was freaked out. Eventually the ambulance showed up. The paramedics carted the old guy off and the man went back to his date and Dale had spent the whole night thinking about how it would feel to be the guy who knew what to do in a situation like that, the one who people listened to when things got heavy.
Dale signed up for the EMT course the next day. He hadn’t told his dad. He wanted to wait until he had something, a certificate or diploma or whatever you got when you passed the exam.
Not long after he’d quit school and moved back home he’d overheard his dad talking to his uncle Jerry. They were sitting out on the porch listening to a baseball game on the radio. The kitchen window was open, and Dale was pouring himself a glass of milk.
“He’s a good kid,” his dad was saying.
“He is,” Jerry said. “A great kid, always was.”
“He’s just kind of a beta dog. You don’t like to say that about your only son but it’s true. He’s willing to be led, is what I’m saying. I love him to death.”
“Of course you do.”
“There’s alphas and betas. It’s how it has to be, but you just want the most for your kid. You know?”
“He’s young. I bet he gets it together.”
“I’d started my own business by the time I was his age. Bought a house.”
“Everyone’s different, man. He’s a good kid.”
“I know. That’s what everyone says.”
Dale went back down to his room at this point.
—
Though Dale’s first ride-along was forever burned into his memory—months later and the sight of the girl run through with a pine stob was still freshly horrible—his second was oddly pleasant, fortuitous even. It was a quiet evening in town, they’d only had a couple calls. One older guy who thought he might be having a heart attack but was just suffering from indigestion. A minor fender bender, a passenger complaining of whiplash. And then, a call from a residential neighborhood not too far from Dale’s father’s house, a child with a possibly broken arm. They got to the scene, and there were bikes on the sidewalk. A boy of about ten writhing on the grass, a woman kneeling next to him, trying to keep him still, smoothing his hair. Dale helped the EMT on duty check the boy over and apply a splint. He stole glances at the mother, cutoff shorts and a tank top, hands dirty like she’d been working in the garden.
In the ambulance the boy’s wailing slowed, and the woman caught Dale looking at her. She smiled.
Later that week he went for a walk and passed her house. She was out in the front yard carting a wheelbarrow load of mulch to spread under the rhododendrons that lined her driveway. The boys were playing basketball, the one in the cast making awkward one-handed shots. Dale was just going to walk by, but then she saw him and waved him over.
He played a game of H-O-R-S-E with the boys and then he fell out and sat there on the lawn with her, watching them play until it started to get dark.
“Well, I’ve got to get these hooligans to bed,” she said, nodding to the boys. “But, if you’re not in a huge hurry, you could finish spreading this mulch for me. I could probably dig up a beer for you.” She laughed as if she were mostly joking but Dale—who had very little experience with these things—could tell fairly easily that this was a woman at some sort of departure point in her life.
Dale stayed. He spread the mulch. It was pitch-dark when she had returned. He was sitting on the front step, and she sat close enough to him that their legs touched. She had beers for each of them and she told him that she was very impressed with people that devoted their lives to helping others in their most dire time of need.
“I agree,” he said. “It’s not for everyone. Very rewarding, though. Or, at least I think it will be.” He was going to say something else but she had her hand on his leg now.
“You could stay,” she said. “Here, tonight, I mean, with me. If you don’t have anything else to do.” She was talking fast now, like now that she’d started, her words were gaining momentum, coming downhill out of control. “I’m not going to sleep with you, I mean, I want to sleep with you but that’s it. I mean, I want to do more than sleep with you but tonight I just want to sleep with you. Maybe this is weird. I don’t know. Never mind.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Sure.”
“Really? I’m forty-three years old and I’m still married, technically.”
Dale shrugged. “I just dropped out of college, and live in my dad’s basement.”
Jeannette laughed like this was the funniest thing ever. “God, that sounds perfect,” she said. “If we could all be so lucky. You want to take a shower?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, again? You’re pretty agreeable aren’t you?”
“I guess.”
“My husband, ex-husband, whatever, once called me a bossy bitch.”
“You seem nice to me.”
She stood, reaching to pull him up too. “My shower’s not real big,” she said. “But, I bet we can both still fit. It might just be a little tight.” She said this last bit right in his ear. Dale figured that sometimes when a woman wants you to sleep with her but not sleep with her she actually means it. This turned out to not be one of those cases.
Later, in bed, her hair still wet, she pulled his arms around her and sighed. “This is what I wanted most,” she said. “I wanted all that other stuff we just did too, but this is it. I miss this so bad sometimes.” Eventually her breathing slowed and Dale thought she was asleep but then she gave a little kick as if startled. “Shit,” she said. “You’ve got to leave in the morning before the boys get up. It would just confuse them.”
I’m kind of confused myself, Dale thought.
—
Five years ago, her husband had been in a motorcycle accident. He’d been left with horrible back pain and had developed an addiction to OxyContin. He was unable to work. He got caught with three different prescriptions from three different doctors. That had scared him straight for a while.
“I thought he was better,” Jeannette said. “It was a hard thing. I never blamed him. I still don’t, really. He was trying. He still seemed out of it, though, like he was when he was on the pills, but he swore he wasn’t taking them anymore and I believ
ed him. I had gotten another job at this point. I was still working days at the nursery and then nights at the Bistro when my mom could watch the boys. Anyway, I’m not complaining, but that’s why I did it. I was fed up. I was tired all the time and I just snapped.”
“What do you mean?” Jeannette had made him dinner. They were doing the dishes when she was telling him this. Standing side by side at the sink, Dale scrubbing a pan, Jeannette drying plates.
“I had him arrested,” she said. “Maybe it wasn’t the right thing to do. I came back from my second job and the boys were home from their grandmother’s, watching TV, and I looked all over for him and I eventually found him in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet. He was—it was—heroin.” She said the word so quietly he could barely hear it over the running water. “He played baseball in college. He was a regional sales rep for outdoor gear. I still can’t really believe it. I called the cops on him. He tried to drive off and they got him before he’d made it five blocks. He did a year in Deer Lodge. He’s in a halfway house in Billings now.” With this, Jeannette finished drying the last plate. She snapped him on the rear with her towel. “Enough of that sob story.”
That night she didn’t tell him that he needed to leave, and the next morning she made him breakfast, the boys looking at him, solemn eyed, across the table.
“Our dad can throw a ninety-mile-per-hour fastball,” the one with the cast said. “How fast can you throw it?”
“Football was always more my sport,” Dale said.
The boy eyed him skeptically. “How tall are you?”
“Five-ten.”
“Where did you play?”
“Right here at Park High.”
“I meant after that.”
“That was it. There was no after that.”
The boy nodded as if this had confirmed some more general suspicion he’d been harboring. “My dad played in college.”
“Okay,” Jeannette said. “Boys, go brush your teeth. Dale, would you like more coffee?”
—
Dale had never been good at taking tests. He could know the material front to back, inside and out, but as soon as he was confronted with that sheet of empty, lettered bubbles—the knowledge that the whole enterprise was timed, the feeling of all the other test-takers silently massed around him, the smell of the freshly sharpened number-two pencils—his eyes would blur over, he’d second-guess himself, he’d sweat through his shirt. The EMT exam was a brutal gauntlet of 120 questions laced with words like: hypovolemia, necrosis, eschar, maceration, and diabetic ketoacidosis.
After running every morning, Dale sat at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice and took practice tests. He put his watch on the table so he could time himself. Sometimes his dad would interrupt him, coming in to get some water, or making toast, or firing up the lawnmower right under the window, but Dale didn’t mind. He could have done his studying in his room, but he liked to do it out in the kitchen where his dad might see. So far, his dad hadn’t asked him what he was up to, but Dale knew he was curious. He’d caught him drinking his morning coffee, thumbing through one of the study manuals, his eyebrows raised.
Dale was taking a practice test, in the middle of trying to decipher a particularly dense question, when Jeannette called. He let it ring. He was fairly certain that the correct answer was C. But, it was one of those questions where there could be multiple right answers, just one was more right than the others. He was pretty sure it was C, but it might have been A as well. These things confused him. He knew it was C. But then it might be A as well in which case it would be D because answer D was both C and A. Fuck. After a moment’s silence, his phone was ringing again. He answered this time and her voice was panicky.
“The creek,” she was saying. “It’s overflowing and it’s going to come in the house and I don’t even know if I have flood insurance and everything is going to be ruined and then mold sets in and maybe the foundation is already getting undermined and then when that happens you might as well just bulldoze the house. And—”
“Okay,” Dale said. “Hang on. Don’t worry about all that. No bulldozing. I’m coming over.”
When Dale got there, Jeannette was standing on the back porch, her hands wrestling themselves. The boys were on the couch watching a movie, and she shut the door so they couldn’t hear.
“I put a stick in the ground to mark where it was last night. That was completely dry yesterday. Now look. It’s come up a foot.”
The creek was huge, out of its banks, sluicing through the willows. The low spot in the yard where Jeannette had her rhubarb was completely underwater. There was a small rise and then the ground sloped back to the house. From what Dale could tell, if the water was to come up another foot it would top the rise and come pouring down the back side; there’d be no way to keep it out of the house at that point.
“Shit,” Dale said. “Okay. Well.” She was looking at him. Waiting for something. Dale imagined he could see it in her face, her want of husband writ large. He didn’t know what to do. “All right,” he said. “We’ll figure it out.”
He went down to the creek, slogged over the saturated ground, cold water rising above his boot tops. He could feel the trembling in the soil, the bushes rollicking in the flow, their roots trying to maintain their hold. A basketball came bobbing down the flat, turgid center of the creek—obscenely orange against the gray current—it caught for a moment against a branch, and then was gone. The creek that normally meandered sleepily through the backyards on this side of town had come awake, answering the call of the main river, bringing with it for tithe anything it could catch up.
“Don’t get too close,” she said, shouting so he could hear over the roar of water. “It’s dangerous.”
He slogged around some more, looking at the small rise that was the last defense against the rising creek, the stick she had pounded into the ground, trying to calculate how much time they had. It didn’t look good. He went back to stand next to her on the porch. He tried to put his arm around her, but she was too nervous. Pacing up and back on the porch.
“Shit, shit, shit. What else?” she said. “What in god’s name can be next?”
Dale didn’t know what to do. He called his dad.
—
Dale hadn’t told his father about Jeannette. But the town was small, and it hadn’t taken him long to find out. He’d been driving through the park, and spotted them sitting on a blanket, the boys playing in a sandbox, Dale’s head in Jeannette’s lap.
That night Dale’s father had insisted on making dinner. “I’m going to grill some elk steaks,” he said. “You make a little salad or something. We haven’t sat down together in a while.”
Dale was at the kitchen table reading about how to spot the signs of diabetic ketoacidosis. He looked at his father warily. “Why?”
“What do you mean, why? We always run off and do our own thing. I haven’t seen you in a week. You too busy to eat a steak with your old man?”
“No. I guess not.”
“Okay, then.” He went out to get the grill going, and Dale washed some lettuce. They ate on the porch, the elk meat leaking red onto their paper plates, the salad mostly untouched, as if it were existing for memorial’s sake, a small gesture of remembrance for the woman who had been gone from their lives for a long time now.
His father had finished eating, his feet kicked up on the porch railing. He took a drink of his beer and belched. “I saw you got a girlfriend now, eh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Saw you in the park. Now, that was a domestic scene. Got yourself a little ready-made family going there.”
“It’s not like that.”
“I recognize that one. That whole thing was in the paper. He used to be a T-ball coach. A drug addict T-ball coach. Hard to imagine. He was embezzling too.”
“He doesn’t really factor into our equation.”
Dale’s father laughed. “Oh, son. Wetting the wick is one thing. Picnics with the kiddies is
a whole different story.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Who said I’m worrying? Trying to impart some advice upon you is all. Pretty soon, you’re going to have fucked the interesting out of her and then you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”
“Save it.”
“I’ll not. You live in my house and you’ll hear me out. All I’m saying is this—women are already a little bit ahead of men, age-wise. So, you start taking up with one who’s got a few years on you, and you’re putting yourself at a big disadvantage. She’s got a head start on you and there’s no way you’re going to catch up, she’ll be lapping you before long and you won’t even know it. There’s damage there. Trust me. When a baby comes out, part of her rational mind comes out with it, caught up in that stuff they throw away.”
“Jesus, Dad.” Dale carried their plates into the kitchen and then retreated to his room. Like his father had some great wealth of knowledge from which to draw his theories about women. As far as Dale knew, there had only been his mother, and god knows that hadn’t worked out too well.
—
Dale went around to the front of the house to make the call where the sound of the rising water wasn’t so loud. When his father picked up the phone Dale could hear voices in the background, phlegmy laughter.
Once a week Dale’s father and a number of his cronies met at the Albertsons for fifty-cent coffee and day-old donuts. It was an hour-long bullshit session. Topics veered, but usually returned and settled comfortably on: the current administration’s latest outrage against common sense, the weather, the elk herd numbers in relation to the burgeoning wolf population, what was hatching on the river, and why it was that the trout were all smaller than they used to be.
Dale filled him in on the situation, and in a few moments he was at the house in his pickup, donut crumbs in his beard. Jeannette was in the driveway, a worried half-smile on her face. Dale’s father brushed off Dale’s attempt at introductions.
